Tidying up the homeless Our HGFN post Homeless in an anxious age, 2 years ago almost to the day, commented on how the world of architecture was, at that time, proudly proclaiming itself on the way to solving the problem of providing emergency shelters for people made homeless by unusual events/disasters. Now, two years later, there are even more new ideas springing up all around a world looking compassionately on the plight of the homeless in Haiti and in Chile. From flat pack prefabs to the bubble house, designers everywhere are gathering under the umbrella term Reaction Housing, to announce plans for low cost housing units that are affordable and practical. Many of these designs would house 12 times the number of people housed by the 7 billion dollars spent by FEMA since 2005 (which has provided 104,477 housing units - shelter for around 397,000 people). Perhaps such wasteful spending with such little result, as exemplified by the above FEMA experience, intensifies their enthusiasm to solve this problem economically. Using currently available know how in housing construction these young designers would use that seven billion dollars to provide housing for millions of people -between 4.5 to 5 million to be more precise. So why are they not being called into the housing supply game? After all, isn't it obvious that local government agencies are growing uneasy about the homeless encampments "springing up" in their midst? Every week at Home Grown Food Network we hear stories of officials ( usually police officers) being directed to "move them(the homeless) on'. In Indianapolis last week homeless people camped informally near the I-70 were told to be "all gone by Monday". The "move them on" order was, as usual, in response to the growing frustration over the burgeoning encampment by nearby residents and business owners. One business owner said that "This is not something you want to step out your front door and take a look at every day. When you see people changing clothes and sitting up here naked and everything else". (full story) Nobody seems to know how many of these encampments there are, but the recently released, Tent Cities in America, a Pacific Coast Report, says that tent cities can be found all across the United States. So where do we go from here? Get into small cliques and grind and gnash our teeth at how untidy the homeless are? Criminalize them and their life styles with ever stricter codes about how they live? ( and hope they get Left Behind!). Or say, like the National Coalition for the Homeless says, ENOUGH ALREADY. Home Grown Food Network is at the center of a growing awareness of how professional prejudices and not shortages of cash are the root cause of the failure to deal with the problem of American homelessness. Let's zone land for homeless encampments, confident that in them we can create spaces for displaced people to live with dignity using modern shelters made from up to the minute materials in designs carefully thought out by our impassioned new generation of caring architects. And for those who say we are dreamers, look at the example of the hundreds of volunteers who, in one day, built homes for 30 homeless people in Ventura using such shelters. (watch video). Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network. - This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Haiti: We like it like this People are shaking their heads in disbelief at reports that Haitians, who "were rowdy", and/or would not fill out paperwork because they could not read or write, were refused food shipped to them. The mechanics of why they did not get the food are what everyone is focusing on, but I think that misses the point. The UN personnel behaved as best they could. They were well trained. Their bosses claimed that it happened because they were unfamiliar with the terrain and that was the end of that. Indeed. This incident in Haiti shows that whatever perception the well fed world has about impoverished, undernourished and homeless people is what prevails. In Haiti the Great Well Fed Ones decided that they have to be quiet and well mannered in lines to be given food.. Oh, and they have to be able to read and write too. It is irrelevant who the Great Well Fed Ones are, as some commentators on the Haiti fiasco claim by blaming the United Nations for it. I think it is irrelevant, because truly, in every developed economy Great Well Fed Ones blame the hungry and homeless for their plight, judge them accordingly, and withhold aid at any whim that strikes them at that time. Home-Grown Food Network has become a reception point for reports of how barriers to aid for the hungry and the homeless are erected at the whim of the lowest ranking bureaucrats in increasing numbers of developed economies, including the United States and the UK. where the report of this incident was first released. The purpose of these barriers is? Who knows? But what happened in Haiti gives us a clue. Those who have the food are saying "let them eat cake/catfood because we say so. We like it like this".". Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network - This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Hate crimes against the homeless A bill to amend the Hate Crime Statistics Act to include crimes against the homeless, The Hate Crimes Against the Homeless Statistics Act of 2009, is heading into a hearing of the Committee on the Judiciary on December 3 next. A hate crime (also known as a bias-motivated crime) occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group. According to the Berkeley, California based organization BOSS, there is a documented relationship between increased police actions that criminalize homelessness and the rising number of hate crimes and violent acts against homeless people.(more) Some criminology theorists maintain that violent citizens become emboldened to attack homeless people because their community leaders have responded negatively to the homeless population. These violent attacks occur especially where a community portrays homeless people as the cause of unemployment, decreasing property values, vacant storefronts or other problems. I don't know for sure what is going to be discussed at the upcoming hearing in Washington, and although I am a great fan of the Open Congress web page, I got lost trying to find the text of the bill there. If anyone knows how to do that please let me know! Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network - This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Working on the Fence, Gates, and Walls for A Less Than $20,000 Apartment Brenda Barnes, Home Grown Food Network President November 1, 2009 What a lot has happened since I last wrote in August! We settled the last existing legal case we were involved in! Actually other people settled it and we just went along with it, very happily. I am so tired of disputes. I never was made to be a lawyer, since I want to, as Rodney King said, “just get along.” So settling the last case forces us to think, what do we want to do for the rest of our life? I did a lot of dreaming—travel, move to Ireland or France or the Czech Republic, win the lottery. Then I thought why would I be more likely to do those things now? What I really would be more likely to do now that I don't have to spend time, energy, and emotion on legal cases is more HGFN work. That's what I was doing when I was so (rudely or not) interrupted. I quit practicing law in 1997 to do that. So I started thinking what can we do now that we couldn't do when I had to dread hundreds of hours of legal work? First we got three hens and Peter built them a moveable coop in the back yard. Then we started rearranging the house where we're staying temporarily, so we can do a demonstration garden there and have some special events. Then we did drawings for putting up a welded wire fence around the area and starting a compost bin and mulching where we agreed to help tenants of a client's apartment building create and run a community garden for themselves. That has been great fun and expanded our view of what we can do. The tenants are poorer than the focus group for Home-Grown Food Network. These tenants are people who live on Social Security Disability payments or pick-up work because there is something wrong with their past, like being ex-convicts, that keeps them from getting a job. The people we've aimed at for Home Grown Food Network were working poor people with two minimum-wage jobs each by two parents, so we could foresee that with only one job each they could support themselves while they built a $20,000 house with the time they used to be spending on the other jobs. These tenants are less than half that well-off. I never thought Home Grown Food Network could help them. We don't aim to help homeless people in general, or disabled people. We really were focused from the beginning on food security, quality, and cost. The only reason we expanded the goals of the charity to ultra-low cost housing and renewable energy is we realized once we started working on edible landscaping that since most of the plants were perennial, people needed to have stable, affordable housing, or they wouldn't make it to harvest. But since our client and friend is dedicated to helping these tenants, we can bypass the problem of providing long-term housing for them. Also, to cover his costs on the garden we are working with him on solar-heating the pool and apartments. So it is a very interesting way of getting back to our first goal: promoting, educating about, and demonstrating edible landscaping. We had hardly begun when one night I kept having this recurring dream, me planting a tiny marijuana plant underneath an herb plant. I'd keep waking up and saying to myself that is ridiculous, I never saw such a small marijuana plant, or some such thing, and going back to sleep, but then I'd have the same dream again. When I woke up in the morning I'd had that same dream at least four times. Suddenly it occurred to me that if we were going to have a community garden, we would have to confront the issue of what to do if someone planted marijuana there. Of course! I googled “community garden” and marijuana and there were over 52,000 entries! And God had to send me the same dream four times before I even thought of it. It turns out to be a problem with every one of those 52,000 people, who are community garden managers, organizers, City officials, organization members, neighbors, and such. The ones planting the marijuana don't seem to write, at least not in the first four pages of entries I read. The client was adamant that allowing the tenants to make money growing marijuana—even in California, where such production for medical use is legal—was not what he wanted to do, so that was that. It will be against the rules of this community garden to plant any plant that could expose the garden to controversy. Sounds like a tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous, appropriately enough. We are hooking up a wireless Internet connection for the tenants to share in a cubicle in the hall, with passwords we give them. We'll see how that works. Last time I wrote a blog I said I had read in the New York Times that estimates are there are now a million absolutely homeless people in the United States (with more being foreclosed on every day, I now hear), and besides truly homeless people there are over 30 million renters who will never even have their name on a mortgage for a house, the way things are now. There may be another 200 million who will never pay a mortgage off, to truly own a house. I think all those estimates are far too low, but whatever the number, virtually all those people could build their own houses and be free. We are very happy to be helping a truly wonderful landlord help people living in seven apartments. It's an exciting life. More on our and at least 231 million other people's progress later. - This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Tractors, no money down! A chicken tractor is, according to the Double Tongue Dictionary, “A bottomless, mobile chicken coop that rests directly on the ground.”(more). Even though our chicken coop is bottomless, it never felt like a tractor because it has been in the same place in the yard for almost two months. I had thought of moving it. Brenda said I should move it. Jim said I should move it. In fact although it was clear that The Board wanted it to be moved, I, the manager, was still dragging my heels. "Are we ready", I asked myself, " to own a tractor?" What about the huge movements of capital, visits to the bank, paperwork, instructions about cold weather starting and the like". Nothing of the sort was needed. I am here to tell you that it took me and the chickens about 30 minutes to park the tractor. Peter Naughton-Manager, Home-Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Nobody here but us chickens? I watch our chickens-three cross bred Americana Browns-for at least ten minutes a day. I think they are fascinating to observe, and so do thousands of people around the internet! In fact some chicken fans let you follow their chickens by putting a webcam in the coop with them! ( watch ) Such entertainment, and at hardly any expense!. (I built the coop the chickens live in with pvc piping and mesh wire that altogether cost $25). We feed them all the left over greens we have from our kitchen plus feed pellets from the feed store-it takes them two weeks to eat $4 of that. Yesterday we opened up the coop door and the three of them spent the entire day out rambling happily around our yard. At dusk they returned to the coop without any direction from us and there settled down for a quiet night. Our chickens are not laying eggs yet, but who cares- their engaging, friendly and entertaining behavior is ample reward for having them around. Jim Shupe, who donated the chickens to Home Grown Food Network, and an expert breeder, predicts that our particular cross breed of Americana Browns will be laying eggs next month. I can hardly wait! Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network - This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Balcony gardens in Manhattan While sightseeing in Manhattan last week we accidentally discovered a cure for going crazy while stuck in traffic there- counting greenhouses, window boxes, or other evidences of apartment gardening in high rise buildings. Try it sometime! I guarantee you you will be surprised to see how many people living in apartments are cultivating a green thumb. Our window box/balcony garden counting adventure began after a leisurely morning working up an appetite cruising Henry Hudson Parkway. We stopped for lunch on 73rd street. Brenda went off to the Red Fort Tandoori on 74th and I went to the famous Finnegan's Wake Restaurant and to a creative bakery across the street for a very traditional Irish desert of a chocolate scone. Thus well fed, we headed uptown thinking we were going to conquer the East Side, but suddenly we found ourselves snarled in endless traffic. It was while stuck at 1st and 96th that we started noticing how many urban gardeners live in that area, and after that whenever we found ourselves stationary we passed the time counting window boxes on balconies in whatever area we were in. It is very humbling always to visit any great city and to witness the miracle of human harmony that it represents. However I think that land use planners have made it unnecessarily difficult for city inhabitants to enjoy gardening as a social networking activity, and thereby miss out on an opportunity to diminish social unrest and urban ennui. Home Grown Food Network is striving to ensure that access to an urban garden for everyone is provided for in future. Seeing how interested even high rise apartment dwellers in New York, one of the most densely populated cities on earth, have in growing flowers and food, there might be a lot of support for it. Peter Naughton, Manager, Home Grown Food - This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site A chicken coop for the soul? Rumor has it that more chickens are clucking in urban yards around America because raising chickens for fresh eggs seems to be a natural progression in the move toward sustainability. We took delivery of our first chickens yesterday, and I am already a big fan of theirs! They seem easy to look after too. I got some feed for them from the feed store and Brenda went to the grocery store and persuaded the produce department manager to give her produce trimmings, lettuce leaves and stalks, for them. Even though we have only had these birds resident on the property for a day and a half I already feel delighted that we got them. We got three chickens because three will not violate any zoning regulations if you have them in a coop like we have. You will not be surprised to know that The Zoning Czars have a sharp eye on this issue and have generated a maze of comments, rules and edicts about the role of the chicken in urban life. (more). I had looked forward to having fresh eggs when we were building the coop, but who could have imagined how soothing chicken noises would be in the background of our busy lives? In my opinion these noises are constantly soothing reminders of nature’s harmony. I even think that counting chicken clucks could be better than counting sheep for inducing sleep, but I will have to do some more research (take more naps) on that before I know for sure. It’s dirty work, but somebody has got to do it! Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network - This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Working on the Fence, Gates, and Courtyard Walls for Another Under $20,000 House Brenda Barnes, Home Grown Food Network President August 12, 2009 Since June 15th, we've been working on moving to a new house in Arizona and getting the land in Joshua Tree ready for a new Home Grown Food Network under $20,000 demonstration house. Sometimes I think I'm amazed at how much we have gotten done. Other times I'm embarrassed how little we've done. All the time I'm quite overwhelmed how much there is left to do. My son's father Floyd helped us by finding a motor home in Arizona for $1,200, and then helping Peter get it to the Joshua Tree land (after updating the title and registration in Arizona). It's an old motor home, so we're not planning on driving it, really. I learned while looking for something with a toilet and shower (plus a stove and refrigerator, but that wasn't as important to us since we like outdoor kitchens), that old motor homes are the cheapest way to go. They get terrible gas mileage, and besides they're so old that they can't be relied on to travel in, so there isn't much of a market for them. That fit our needs just fine. We just needed someplace to be in out of the weather and have privacy so we can stay there overnight if we want to every once in awhile, while we are building our compound that substitutes for a house and a yard. Floyd learned he had acute leukemia last week, just a few days after he was driving on Highway 62 with Peter. Pray for him. He's in UCLA Hospital now, the best teaching hospital there is around here, so I'm sure he's getting the latest treatment. They say people live with that now for 10 years, compared to four months if they don't get treated, so it's lucky he kept pushing himself and finally got so dizzy my son and his wife took him to the emergency room in Joshua Tree, where the tests they did showed his Santa Monica doctor he had leukemia or some other serious illness, so she had him admitted right then. I saw him Saturday, when he'd had transfusions for days so he had his energy back and looked good. Peter is going on with putting up the welded wire fence around the area where the compound will be. We'll post drawings soon. It's going to be a California indoor-outdoor living space, 4,200 square feet “under roof,” as the real estate ads say. For less than $20,000 including the land and off-the-grid utilities and water tanks, and plants, with some animals like chickens and talapia, growing all our own food. Of course I bought the land at a tax sale years ago when Joshua Tree was the cheapest really nice place around, so one could not duplicate that now. Nonetheless, the concept is valid: if people want to build their own houses and not have any mortgage, utility bills, or food costs, they can, for less than $20,000 total cost, and for the amount as they go along that people on Social Security or welfare, or workers on minimum wages, can afford. The per square foot cost of the under-roof living space is less than $5! I've been reading and watching shows lately on House Hunters International about houses in third-world countries for 100 times that much. To say nothing of Santa Monica. Last Saturday I drove to Santa Monica and back, to see Floyd and to take things and do some errands for my son, who had gone quickly from Joshua Tree the day before when he heard his father had been admitted to the hospital. I was tired at the end of it, but it cost less than $30 in gas, round-trip, and took less than half a day. So I don't see any sense in living there in a condo for $375,000 plus more in monthly homeowners' fees than it will cost us for living here, with yards where we can have pets and livestock if we want to, and where we can experience what people drive from Santa Monica to see, the National Park and amazing sunsets, plus have five full-service casinos and 200 golf courses within an hour's drive. I spent 35 years “living” at the beach, but really working all the time to pay the expenses of being there. Now I'm happy to see it once in awhile and have a real life here. All I miss is an El Pollo Loco and some restaurants that stay open after 9 p.m. right in town. The closest place for that is Palm Springs or Cathedral City, 30 miles away. The fence Peter is putting up is going to have a row of tall nut and fruit trees inside it, then a wall 10 feet high and three feet thick, made of tires stuffed with earth. These walls last 1,000 years or longer, through earthquakes and floods, and are fireproof. Those plus wind and sun damage—to which these walls are also impervious—are all the natural hazards we have to worry about here. Therefore, there is no reason to follow any uniform building codes covering snowloads or hurricanes or tornadoes. I have written beforebefore about how difficult it was to learn we could actually build a house this way without permits and grow all our own food here, legally. That makes me think it may be possible to do the same kind of thing—adapted for different conditions--a lot more places than people think. 99 people out of 100 would have given up at the third planning office I went to, after I already had done enough research to see the idea, where the third set of planners told me we would need a conditional use permit (read: forget it) to do what I said we wanted to do. I am sure if I had not been a real estate lawyer myself I would never have either had the original ideas myself or found a lawyer who would have suggested it is possible, even, so I wouldn't have tried the first planning office. I spent literally 200 hours in three months back at the first planning office after I went to the third one, hanging around, asking my same questions one more new way, until finally a planner told me the last key to the puzzle, just to get rid of me so he could go back to his online Solitaire game in peace. Regardless, though, of how hard it was to figure out and get through the maze of government regulation, the fact is that Peter and I are the perfect people to have figured this out, and we are going to do what we figured out how to do, and tell everyone along the way. Housing does not have to be the ridiculous mess planners and the rest of incompetent, elitist governments have made it. I read today in the New York Times that estimates are there are now a million absolutely homeless people in the United States. Some of them are living in flood drainage pipes under the Las Vegas Strip, where they could be drowned by flash floods, rather than be hassled by police and killed by sport-killers above ground. Besides truly homeless people there are over 30 million renters who will never even have their name on a mortgage for a house, the way things are now. There may be another 200 million who will never pay a mortgage off, so they truly own a house. I think all those estimates are far too low, but whatever the number, there are many, many people out there being preyed upon by landlords, real estate speculators and developers, and governments, besides police and sport-killers, when the fact is all those people could build their own houses and be free. It's an exciting life. More on our and at least 231 million other people's progress later. - 30 - This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Let Them Eat Cat Food In a recent blog, one of my favorite bloggers, GrrlScientist, has a picture of a homeless lady in New York city eating cat food . The blog highlights the reaction of New York City to the findings of New York State auditors who have discovered "new data" about the costs of homelessness in that state. As I often say, land use planners act as surprised on discovering homeless humans as if they had found aliens disembarking from a mother ship in their plan areas. Now the accountants are acting surprised too and, as GrrlScientist points out, they are full of ideas on how to punish the homeless, or if not punish them, at least give them some menu advice, (updated from pre French Revolution times), accompanied by a regally dismissive nod, " let them eat cat food". From where will a new attitude to the plight of the homeless emerge? I look for clues! The National Alliance to End Homelessness has a fact sheet, for kindergarten and second graders, that aims to lead the students to generate their own individual perception of homeless people. Unfortunately by the time these second graders have grown up, and should they be fortunate enough to get to an Ivy League School for example, they will be virtually forced into "agitating for a serious national debate on the question of the degree to which we still want to consider home ownership a public good!". The basis of this debate is, yes you guessed it, a theory, which, similar to the theory on which the principles of "proper Planning" rests, demands that anything that cannot be "explained" by "the theory" simply doesn't exist! If "the non-existent phenomenon" needs to eat cat food to live on, that's a curiosity, but not necessarily one to be taken seriously. At Home Grown Food Network we are part of a network of awareness of how a bright future is possible for homeless people. It is based on the concept that a house for under $20,000 can be provided in a way that low income people can understand and use to create a dignified and creative environment for themselves and their families. Institutional barriers to this concept, such as discriminatory zoning practices, are being challenged and overcome on a daily basis. The result is a new understanding of how solutions to homelessness need not cost as much as they do. It also provides opportunities for people to grow their own food in their own gardens and not need to eat cat food from a tin while perched on a doorstep that is not their own. Peter Naughton, Manager, Home Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Demonstrating Ultra Low Cost, Easy, Fast, Cheap, Self-Made Housing, Edible Landscaping, and Renewable Energy, Cont'd., Independence Month Brenda Barnes, President Home-Grown Food Network, Inc. North Palm Springs-Joshua Tree, California, July 11 This week we made a lot of progress in our under-$20,000, easy, fast, cheap, self-made housing, edible landscaping, and renewable energy project. We had updated my research from a few years ago last week and discovered in the county anything allowed in the zone can still be put in without a permit. Home Grown Food Network owns 2.5 acres there in a lovely location to demonstrate under $20,000 gracious, large, wonderful housing, edible landscaping, and renewable energy. All of that, and a 10,000 square foot agricultural building and produce selling, are allowed in the zone, which is rural living. It took me several trips to three different planning offices in the county a few years ago to finally get someone to tell me how to establish crop cultivation use on land. And I had 20 years as a real estate lawyer, so I thought I knew the right questions to ask. One planner told me we needed a conditional use permit! So Desert Hot Springs is not alone in making things difficult for people. Governments are governments. It turns out you need 10 trees and some kind of watering system for them. We could do that with our self-watering planters made from recycled 55-gallon plastic food drums within a day, without even having any water onsite. Each planter takes 20 gallons of water to water itself for five months, so a few trips in a pickup with water and we'd have it. If we wanted onsite watering, we could just buy a water tank, put it on a wooden tower to gravity-feed, and have some water delivered. So now I told you how to do it, without any trips to any planning offices. And not even any permits required, much less a conditional use permit, which would take thousands of dollars and years for an ordinary person to get approved, so it was just ridiculous to say that was necessary. Governments are—you fill in the blank. I'm the President of a 501(c)(3) charity, so I have to be careful not to be too political. Anyway, the Home Grown Food Network land is less than a block from the main highway through the area, and a courthouse with a large parking lot not used on Saturdays and Sundays when we will be having most of our events. The front of the lot on the Palm Springs side is where the street that goes to the courthouse from the highway, Whitefeather Road, would go if it extended the other way from the highway. We are going to put in broken concrete pieces and spray-paint them yellow for a “yellow brick road” to the site, about 800 feet to the edge of our lot, which is another about 300 feet in front. If the county ever extends the road in that direction, we'll already have a sidewalk. Peter and I went there late one day this week, when it was almost dusk, to walk that route from the courthouse and lots of other parking along the highway. It's just sand and creosote bushes now, and two tiny washes a foot or so wide and deep, but it will be easy to cover with the broken concrete. Goodness knows there's plenty of that to recycle in the world. I think the interesting thing about reusing it broken is that it is permeable then, so rain percolates down into the aquifer instead of running off into gutters and flooding roads, then becoming a dirty mess at the wastewater treatment center. Walking there we were so blown away as we always are by how beautiful the view is all around. You can see the rocks of Joshua Tree National Park to the East, San Gregonio mountain in Palm Springs in the far distance about 25 miles away to the North, the Chocolate Mountains, I think they're called, to the South before 29 Palms, and a huge mesa with more mountains in the distance to the West. In this part of the county everyone calls the distances something else—Palm Springs is called West, 29 Palms East, the mesa North, and the Park South, but my compass has them closer to what I said. Whatever, the views in all directions are so magnificent. People say there is a 360 degree view, but even more so, the sky—always blue during our 360 days per year of sunshine--goes up and away in all directions for miles, and once you start to love it as we do, the desert earth is colorful and beautiful. So it is a three-dimensional 360 degree view, is that 720 degrees? When you're there at night it is in a way even more awesome. The sky is black and it seems like the stars are just hundreds of feet away. We see falling and shooting stars every hour or so. There are billions of stars and planets, of course, and here it seems as if we can see all of them. Our grandchildren learned the galaxies and planets at young ages because they are so easy to see with your naked eyes. So what a place to build demonstration houses and landscaping! I would have preferred to start in Desert Hot Springs because it is more accessible for the millions of people surrounding us within 300 miles (Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix-Tucson, and San Diego-Yuma-Baja California, Mexico). It also is five acres of commercial land so we will make millions for the charity developing it some day. However, today it is much easier to start in San Bernardino County, where there are no permits required, and it is just as beautiful. I made a drawing of how we're going to begin, and Peter will use CAD to put it on the website. In the meantime since we started work on this our Board member Jim Shupe has built a misting system for rooting cuttings that has a sensor for controlling water use, unlike ones available commercially for the same cost of about $200, which just use timers. We will need thousands of plants. We'll buy the first bunch to establish the crop cultivation use of the land and provide some privacy at the first demonstration site until we have something we want people to see. Then we'll be able to root our own cuttings for virtually nothing, just the water cost and our labor, taking cuttings from plants in the area where people are already growing good-tasting, productive food. Peter is going to move the welded-wire fence he put up in Desert Hot Springs, and we decided to make this first space bigger and put in a very large demonstration house and areas for WWOOFERS and other volunteers who want to camp out and learn and help on the farm. So we're going to add more welded wire fencing. The land in Desert Hot Springs is called a “boulder patch,” whereas the land here is sandy with no rocks to speak of in it, so it will be much easier to build the fence here. I feel bad about having to have him move the fence within a month of building it, but he says he's OK with that. We bought a small old motor home for $500 and the $100 cost of getting the registration and smog permit up to date, so we'll stay out on the land in that some if we want to while we're building. We also are going to buy at least one 19' diameter “yome” from Red Sky [link]. It's in North Carolina, and my dad and mom are not well in the New Orleans area, so since shipping costs $220 and we can make the trip for that one way, we'll combine going there to pick it up with a trip in our Toyota pickup to see Mom and Dad. We loved traveling around the South for two weeks instead of flying when my niece Allison got married a few years ago. That trip—and especially the Smokey Mountains where we'll go back again to pick up the yome—has been punctuation of our lives (as the late Dr. David Viscott says vacations are) for both of us, so we really look forward to going back. Savannah, Charleston, the Outer Banks. Lovely places, especially after our favorite of all, New Orleans. This time we thought we'd start with the west coast of Florida after New Orleans and not go so far north but go to the Bahamas, different places Peter has never been and I love. It sounds so good the whole family wants to come, so if it can be fit in with year-round basketball practice for our budding pro 14-year old six-foot granddaughter, who's on the Santa Monica High basketball team as of three weeks ago, they will fly and meet us there. My parents are in their late 80s, so we should not put it off. In the meantime, this week we'll get more done on the land. It's work, but the inspiration of the mission fuels us. What an exciting life! – 30 - This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site July 4, 2009 Demonstrating Ultra Low Cost, Easy, Fast, Cheap, Self-Made Housing, Edible Landscaping, and Renewable Energy, Cont'd., Independence Day Brenda Barnes, President Home-Grown Food Network, Inc. North Palm Springs-Joshua Tree, California I'm writing about another new phase in our under-$20,000, easy, fast, cheap, self-made housing, edible landscaping, and renewable energy project. We settled the case against the mobile home park, as I wrote about June 6, 2009. Since then, we moved as much as we could in the time we had of the voluminous stuff we had inside the house outside, so we could move it on to new sites in the next 60 days after June 22, 2009. In the time since then, only 12 days, we've bought one RV to be able to travel around from site to site and are close to buying another one to leave most of the time and getting the septic tank put in so we can stay when we need to supervising and doing the development work at another site the charity owns. That's been an interesting process. One of the sites is a commercial 5-acre parcel in the City of Desert Hot Springs (adjacent to North Palm Springs where we've been located). The other is 2.5 acres residential (zoned rural living), located in the County of San Bernardino, about 20 miles from the DHS site. Peter was going to write up what happened if we applied for permits to do the same development in both places, as far as commercial and residential development would be compatible given the two zoning laws, at the same time. His masters' thesis in urban planning at Cambridge was on the effect of local zoning and planning processes on development, a comparative study between Ireland and Norway. This seemed to be a logical extension and update of that, and maybe he could get a research grant and/or get his Ph.D. We're going to do the developments anyway, and we need to keep track of what happens to us for blogs and to keep justifying HGFN's existence as a 501(c)(3) charity, so it looked logical to do an academic study, too. My hypothesis on that—based on the lifelong research of Professor Lawrence Hagman, whom I had for an urban planning and law seminar in my last year at UCLA School of Law—was that getting permits in a city would be more expensive, slower, and ultimately more difficult than it would be in a county. Professor Hagman says every layer of government becomes more oppressive, duplicative, and expensive than the one above it. He says people put in a more local government because they think the layer they have at the time is too far away and unresponsive to some particular concern they have, like gays in the 70s in West Hollywood thinking the County of Los Angeles sheriffs were discriminating against them on Santa Monica Blvd. So people put in a city or town government to be in their control on that issue. It may work on the one issue. I haven't heard of City of West Hollywood police discriminating against gays. But on myriad other issues—and as time goes on and the people who cared about the one issue get less involved in watching what the new government is doing, and in many cases there really isn't enough legitimate things for yet another government to do--government expands and becomes intrusive in all sorts of things people used to manage for themselves. Besides, the local people who get elected and appointed to things never held office before, so there's the aspect of being amateurs. Ironically, being local turns out to be the worst nightmare. Sarah Palin, after all, got elected mayor of Wasilla, Alaska because there wasn't anyone else who wanted to be on the city council and she just pushed her way in once she got elected. Totally unqualified, ignorant, uninformed local people enjoy having power over their bothersome neighbors and then think because they can see Russia they're qualified to control those neighbors, too. Boy, was I wrong! It turns out to be impossible in the city, incredibly easy and free in the county. Cities may be oppressive, but they're expensive and slow. If I wrote the details, you'd think I was making them up. The City makes people have permits to move or build the smallest building, even a doghouse, into the city, and the permit fees, payable in cash in advance and kept whether or not the permit is granted, are over $5,000. The last time we turned in a plan, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING happened for TWO YEARS. By contrast, in the county anything allowed in the zone can be put in without a permit. No cost, no delay, absolute certainty. Imagine! One thing I found out while researching this is that 78% of the commercial land in the City of Desert Hot Springs is vacant. No wonder! If there is land 20 miles away where the government is governing the largest county on the planet and does not feel the need to supervise or collect a fee for every move a citizen makes—much less being able to—why would a developer bother with Desert Hot Springs? Amazing what one learns when one takes action. It's the Law of Action. See The Secret. I'll let you know how these actions turn out, and what our adjustments from those outcomes are. What an exciting life. – 30 -- This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Gardening for renters July 4, 2009 Starting out from scratch with a garden is an exciting prospect as Stephanie Paige Ogburn recently wrote. But what if you're a renter, and you need to convince your landlord that "your garden to be" is not going to end up a mess?. Convincing a reluctant landlord to allow you to dig up part of the yard to put in a garden is tough. To prove your gardening skills, tell your landlord about training and classes you have taken, and show photos of your past gardens. (more tips) Try not to get too emotional about your past gardening experiences unless your landlord is a gardening enthusiast. If so, you can tell your favorite stories about how much you loved the shade in your garden on hot summer days and how proud you were of the color and energy that you were responsible for allowing the earth to introduce into your life. Observe your landlord's reactions to these stories. Most gardening enthusiasts will give you a free rein about how you go about creating your garden. However some landlords might have special rules about some designs, like what artifacts they don't like in a garden-molded plastic pink flamingos, to mention an extreme example! It's tough on renters who want to have a garden but can't. Interestingly, guerrilla gardening is on the increase. Stories abound about people of all age groups who will do almost anything to get a space to grow their favorite flowers and/or food in. I like this one about the lady in Paris who just got up and started being a guerrilla gardener at 71! The Los Angeles Times calls them "free range tillers"! Home Grown Food Network is making friends with gardeners everywhere. We have plans to create gardens where an allotment type of garden sharing can occur on land owned by HGFN. Those plans are taking time to come to fruition because of zoning restrictions on the sites we have earmarked for this use. As we wait, we are excited by the growing network of gardeners springing up everywhere around us. We will not discriminate against any of them based on whether they own the land they garden on or not. Growing food and flowers is an ageless joy, and that is the wonderful human experience which we want to promote. Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Demonstrating Ultra Low Cost, Easy, Fast, Cheap, Self-Made Housing, Edible Landscaping, and Renewable Energy June 6, 2009 I'm writing about a new phase in our under-$20,000, easy, fast, cheap, self-made housing, edible landscaping, and renewable energy project. We settled the case against the mobile home park. That's so hard to believe. I'd been working on that over three years when we agreed to settle. It would have been impossible if we had looked at what three years' work is worth, or how do we get the demonstration we have been working for all this time, or how do we make an example of the %^&amb;*(s we have been dealing with, or other things we talked about all this time. Instead, Peter and I worked for about a week at changing our thinking to what we would do now with a certain amount of money if we were finished working on this case. It was so hard, and mainly I at first. When we seriously started considering it, Peter said he felt as if he'd been kicked in the head. I understood. I too had so much trouble with a feeling of loss. What I came to was this year things are different from last year, so I had to like build a wall in my mind hiding everything I thought last year from consideration. Obama has stimulus programs, there are deflated industries where there are all kinds of resources, and there are sources of information like the Internet, which we can take advantage of if we stop looking at the past. So I started listing what we would spend settlement money they were offering for. We have to pay back some people who supported us through this. Once again, if we tried to pay them as we thought we would be able to if we finished the case, there wouldn't be nearly enough money. It would be impossible to do even that, much less start something else. So we figured out how we could pay them back over a few years if we started projects that made money. Those include an energy farm at the Home-Grown Food Network property in Desert Hot Springs. That is possible only because of the stimulus program and progress financing such projects over the last few years. Seeing how it worked in Germany really inspired me. People rent neighbors' roofs to put solar panels on them! There still wasn't enough money, so we told them a higher amount. They didn't come up that high, but we figured again, if there could be any way to accomplish all we'd need to with only that much. Still there wasn't, but we talked a lot of things over with our family and friends and kept looking for ideas on the Internet. Eventually the Park came up a little more, and we were convinced we could do enough with that with this forward-looking attitude we had developed, we should do it. So we did. Another thing that helped is another group from our past has sued us in the last few months, and devoting my energies to that case should result in much more money than devoting more to this one ever could have. Plus I really couldn't do both. Looking back over the past few years, I see each case ends up paying six or seven times as much as the last one. If I devote myself to this new case and that holds, there will be enough money to pay for the time I put into this last case, after all. But the main thing was, there is enough money now from this settlement to do projects Board members wanted to do, and if we are relieved of having to work on the case, the money is enough to get started. So we're moving. One of the things I learned from this new case and the last one is to NEVER use a home address on anything, now that it ends up being published on the Internet by people who are malicious. So I'm not saying precisely where we are moving, but it is in this same area. Edible landscaping, renewable energy, and more under-$20,000 house demonstrations are in the works. We'll have video and pictures of our progress, and some day when it is far enough along that we can live in safety and have an actual demonstration site as well, we will do that too. We're living and learning, looking forward to showing you much more as we go along. Brenda Barnes, President Home-Grown Food Network, Inc. This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site UFO lands in Los Angeles? June 1, 2009 I wrote earlier this year about how land use planners participate in a professional conspiracy to prevent a solution to the problem of homelessness (read the blog here). I repeat my direction in that post to "Go to any city planning commission meeting right now and you will hear planners act as surprised to find homelessness on their doorstep as if they found aliens disembarking from a newly arrived space ship". If you cannot get to a city planning commission meeting watch the CNN video on "The (latest) Big Find of Homeless" people. (watch the video here). The video describes how an area under an I 10 overpass in Los Angeles had been converted into a shelter by a community of homeless people and was now being cleared by the California State Highway Agency, Cal Trans. One of the homeless people, a woman named "Mib", while watching the workers shredding all (belongings of homeless campers) they found under the overpass as if it were from outer space, bursts into tears, saying "all this stuff is just here"with the implication that it was just what people anywhere need to live-bedding, mattresses, and food!! She also said that "we're not even recognized, we're just swept under the carpet like trash". That echoes the truth, sometimes whispered in land use planning circles nowadays, that proper planning is an anti-poor practice based on the goal “Move out the trash to make the city clean and green”. Up until the World Planners Conference in 2006 this goal was never even mentioned, because the word trash is being used to refer to the poor. Now, since the adoption of the Reinventing Planning resolution (more) at that conference, this goal is only whispered. You will rarely hear it spoken out loud, and certainly never at a planning commission meeting. It's not only in California that you will find homeless encampments hidden along freeways and bridges. Freeways everywhere provide the thread beside or under which homeless camps can "be found". (more). For the record, freeways are not the only place you will find homeless camps. In fact individuals who have as a primary residence any public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings abound throughout the USA, as they do throughout the world. So why is helping the homeless with housing so difficult? It seems to be a nobrainer. There is a clue in the tone of journalists reporting on the homeless people being "found" throughout the country. They seem to insinuate that housing is the last thing the homeless need! Nope- public opinion wants to "clean them up", "stop them reading pornography", and "stop them 'probably' using drugs". In fact reporters on the Los Angeles "find of the homeless under the freeway" highlighted the evidence they found of "drug use" and "pornography". That was after they had barged in unannounced on the camp. I guess it did not occur to them that if they invaded the privacy of any housed person they might find similar evidences. Only the poor are held up to ridicule for behavioral nuances that are tolerated everywhere in society. (more). Instead of being offered an opportunity to house themselves, they are judged, and then swept away like trash! In Home Grown Food Network, through the many interactions we have had with people of all ages and professional backgrounds, we are discovering that most human beings have in mind a few shreds of the happiness that comes from having a home. Every human being can create a shelter when given access to the land and simple building resources to do so. That's the real message of the "discovery of homeless encampments". Instead of responding as if we had just found aliens in our midst we should be providing sites and utilities for them to build on. Peter Naughton, Manager, Home Grown Food Network. This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site A Garden of Your Own May 17, 2009 Home Grown Food Network's Ultra Low Cost House Demonstration at Desert Hot Springs, California, is using a corner of the East Yard to demonstrate that you can grow potatoes in recycled garbage bags. The demo area is in the corner as far away from prying cameras as we can manage, and near a source of leaves and twigs needed to supply the potatoes with a medium to grow in. The roadrunners that adopted the yard as their base come and take a twig or two each every day, but we keep it stocked up and the potatoes are coming along nicely. The East Yard is emerging as a self contained place. Here, individual visitors can view the development of the gazebo as a seedling start area and then sit to enjoy an iced tea in shade and seclusion inside the front gate. Just last week two visitors were commenting on how the presence of our cement mixer in the yard added a touch of authenticity to the "work in progress" aspect of project. The mixer is still in use, and is not, as the Park Management had called it, "clutter". We had a fun discussion on how to creatively use what was in the yard to camouflage the mixer for occasions when we have visitors and, thanks to our privacy, our visitors felt confident enough to actually experiment with some of their own camouflage ideas! Including dressing it up as a scarecrow! While visiting this project, people of all ages seem inclined to talk about how gardening in a private space provides a soothing environment that releases tension, engages the senses, provokes curiosity and invites interaction with nature. Gardening is well known to be a fun inter-generational activity during which the younger people learn some tried-and-true gardening activities. And we are discovering that all age groups interpret the clearly private space provided by our Ultra Low Cost Housing Demonstration as an invitation to feel free to relax and get creative! Even to go so far as to invent ways to dress up a cement mixer! Just for fun! Peter Naughton, Manager, Home Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Grocery Gaps May 10, 2009 The number of people living in what health experts have called a ‘food desert’—an urban area with few supermarkets and, therefore, limited access to cheap, healthful food- is on the increase. I wrote about this last year when I experienced it myself during a vacation in Escondido, but normally living within a two mile round trip of a Stater Bros supermarket as we do, we are not in a 'food desert'. Food deserts are caused by the increase in distances separating family homes from the sources of fresh groceries, the "grocery gap". In any "food desert neighborhood" it is easier to buy beer or twinkies than tomatoes or lettuce. What causes the grocery gap? Big grocery stores, with their aisles of fresh produce, relying on the volume of food they sell at razor thin profit margins locating each store to reach the maximum number of shoppers, are the cause. But these companies are not likely to change that tendency. They do not care that the grocery gap becomes a transportation gap too. The fact that their customers are forced to travel a distance from another part of town to get a head of lettuce, because their small local convenience store has no lettuce, is not relevant to their business goals! So if the stores do not care, who does? The government? In the annual survey of food security, ( a euphemistic term for hunger), the only questions are about anxiety that the household budget is inadequate to buy enough food; inadequacy in the quantity or quality of food eaten by adults and children in the household; and instances of reduced food intake or consequences of reduced food intake for adults and for children. The annual survey never mentions the grocery gap! In February 2009, SNAP/Food Stamp participation was 32,554,795 people, the highest participation level on record.(more) and more than 36.2 million people in U.S. households face a constant struggle against hunger. (More data on hunger in the USA here) Officialdom declares that "the mental and physical changes that accompany inadequate food intakes can have harmful effects on learning, development, productivity, physical and psychological health, and family life". Authorities all over the world maintain that the ability to obtain enough food for an active, healthy life is the most basic of human needs. And having said that, authorities "have" to stop. At Home-Grown Food Network we are creating a focus for people to come together and share their awareness of their ability to obtain enough food. Grocery gaps and institutional failures, including anti-poor city planning practices, starve people, not of food, but of the necessary resources and freedoms to grow their own food. These planning practices emerged at a time when hunger was not a national problem. Now that millions and millions are hungry, isn't it about time we created zoning ordinances that allowed edible landscaping in cities and suburbs? Then, instead of playing victim to where giant supermarkets choose to build their stores, people will unleash their own innate ability to obtain enough food by growing it themselves as individuals, or as members of neighborhood gardening groups, or as participants in community wide gardening movements! Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Plastics May 1, 2009 Remember this dialogue in The Graduate (1967)? Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Benjamin (played by Dustin Hoffman): Yes, sir. Mr. McGuire: Are you listening? Benjamin: Yes, I am. Mr. McGuire: Plastics. Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir? ( more quotes from the movie) Back when The Graduate was first released, plastics were mysterious, and to me, an undergraduate, it was plausible that they would yield a promising business career, if not in Ireland, certainly in America! Now after over 40 years of development, plastics have given us bulletproof vests, credit cards, slinky spandex pants, led to breakthroughs in medicine, aerospace engineering, and computer science. But now everyone is about to collapse into "wrist slittlingly depressed" mood because the flaw with plastics is that they last and last, even when we want them to disappear! Solutions besides wrist slitting please? Anyone? PLEASE? When we were in Ireland last, we were surprised to be told at the checkout in Spar at The Glebe in Donegal that we would have to pay for plastic bags. After that we always brought reusable shopping bags with us when we went grocery shopping there! Ireland calls this charge on plastic shopping bags at checkouts a "Plastax". An awareness of plastics in the environment has been created by the charge (more) Instead of being filled with gloom about plastics in landfills and in the ocean, the Irish have begun to get interested in reducing the amount of plastic that they themselves throw away. And recycling has been added to the already long list of topics which you can bring up "for a chat" by the fireside or over a pint of Guinness.. Recycling plastic is so necessary and at the same time provides endless opportunities for being creative. I saw a dog on a leash made of plastic bags two days ago in Desert Hot Springs. Ok, I must admit I thought that that was a bit extreme, but why not do that? At Home Grown Food Network we are growing potatoes in recycled garbage bags! Air Bear, is an example of Garbage Bag Sculpture (watch video here). And you can find at least 20 ways to re-use plastic bags over and over again here. I have not even touched on reusing plastic containers such as milk or yogurt cartons. The gardening trend is to re-use them in the yard, especially in areas where water is scarce, and ideas abound for doing so creatively. As a word of caution here, Home-Grown Food Network has discovered that this could be more difficult for low income people in an urban environment. Low income people frequently get discriminated against for being untidy when they use recycled materials in their yards (more). I planted six new tomato plants today in tins that canned tomatoes were shipped in. As a gardener growing my own food and a responsible citizen reusing a container to grow them in, I felt calmer about the plastics "crisis"- I was taking action to play my own part in the solution to this global problem. Back in 1967 I could never have imagined that it would one day become socially responsible to start tomatoes growing in a can that was used to ship tomatoes in instead of throwing that container in the landfill. Maybe this is why Dustin Hoffman asked Mr. McGuire "Just how do you mean that, sir?" Peter Naughton-Manager, Home-Grown Food Network. This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Earth Day 2009 April 22, 2009 Escaping My Mother's Life and Creating My Own: A Love Song for Earth and Mother's Days North Palm Springs, California Brenda Barnes, President Home Grown Food Network, Inc. Lately we've been in a spurt of activity around the front and side where we are making a Home Grown Food Network demonstration house and garden. We're finishing our fences made out of recycled things from wine bottles to advertising ”people” cut-outs painted red, to plywood signs that were drying in the desert for 10 years made into murals, to a thrownaway car hood turned on its side. This week we'll finish stuccoing the rammed-earth courtyard wall in the front yard and start planting in recycled planters on top of it. The gazebo frame is almost a greenhouse. We've pulled up juniper roots (that took days for each one!), and replaced them with a mosaic recycled tile courtyard floor and potatoes growing in garbage bags. We made a planting box equivalent to a 5' x 5' garden out of a truck tool box I found blown off on the side of Highway 62, adapting an idea I saw on Martha Stewart for a wooden planting box with hardware cloth to drain the planting bed. At first I thought this spurt was because we had time, since there was a lull in all the litigation I've been working on for years. Then I thought it was because we bought a Toyota pickup with money we got paid for winning a motion, so we could bring materials here easier. You know how they say once a Marine, always a Marine? I think once a lawyer, always a lawyer. My first thought always is my legal work causes everything, but then I realize there is a lot more to it than that. It's been 12 years since I was a lawyer. I guess it's not surprising I have changed so much and can now finally on second thought see things in more than just a legal way. Twelve years is as long as I was in grades one through 12. I changed in those 12 years from a little five-year-old who couldn't read, to a graduation speaker making a cliched point misquoting JFK's inauguration speech a few months before. ”Ask not what your country can do for you. . .” That much time can really change a person—and did change me. I went from a poor girl in too large a family with no prospects other than staying stuck on the wrong side of the Kern River in Oildale, to a 17-year old with full scholarships to Berkeley. I was so grateful to never have to even look back to Oildale, much less live there. I also thought I had escaped my mother's life. Those prior 12 years growing up were days I remember well, and still shudder. That was when women chose whether to be mothers, nurses, secretaries, or teachers. Or failing to qualify for any of those, they fell back on being waitresses, hairdressers, house cleaners, or babysitters. Or failing to qualify for any of those, they became nondescript miscellaneous ”crazies,” who lived alone in little houses, were called Grandma, and wouldn't return balls hit over their fences. I was so scared I would end up being any of those except a teacher—which seemed to me my only chance to escape my mother's life or worse. So I desperately made choices I thought I had to make along the way. I refused to take typing in 12th grade because even with 11 years of straight A grades I knew if I learned to type, I'd end up being a secretary. I got married at 19 because we both planned to go back to Berkeley in the fall after we met, and my dad said he was sure I'd live with my boyfriend, so if I didn't get married I couldn't go. Kids were minors then until we were 21. So I took 10 milligrams a day of estrogen in Enovid, the new birth control pill that would let me finish college even though I was married. That was also when if women had ”good” husbands and could manage to do all the housework after we came home from work, we felt lucky our husbands ”let” us work. Late in that 12 years I began to feel side effects of so much estrogen and then progesterone, which was all they had in birth control pills then whereas now there are combinations to fight those side effects. The current hormone dosage in birth control pills is less than one-tenth of a milligram a day, but I took 10 milligrams a day, 100 times that much, for two years, 5 a day for a year, and then 1 a day for a few more years. My heart started beating irreglarly, and I knew something bad might happen. The OB-Gyn told me to stop taking birth control pills immediately and prescribed three alternative forms of birth control. I became pregnant in two months. I didn't die, but I got married again. That 12 years when I was getting educated and divorced, being a teacher, and being a human guinea pig had also changed all women in the United States, not just me. The 12 years after I graduated from high school in 1961 included growth of Feminism. Thank you, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and all the many, many others. Those 12 years also included Title 7 and 9. Therefore, my class that started in 1972 at UCLA School of Law had one-third women, the first class with more than a token few. Roe v. Wade was decided in my first year of law school. I wondered if later generations would know what it meant to never have to get married if you didn't decide in advance for your own reasons to do so. I was caught in the middle. I had moved to the future, but I was married with a child, in a way in my mother's life. I tried to do it all, be it all, be a mother and wife (how terrible I was at it, I can't face even today), and become and then be a lawyer. Seeing how much better I am at law today than I was 12 years ago, I think I must have been pretty terrible at being a lawyer, too, but I didn't know it then and I'm not sure even now. My mother helped raise my son so I could do it all. She was my Sojourner Truth, so selfless in helping me escape. Then she moved to Louisiana with my brother when he went to teach at a better medical school. She raised his kids, also, so he and his wife, a world-class oncology surgeon, could do it all. I had come too far in some ways and not far enough in other ways to escape. I focused on my husband and son, the real estate investments I had made while I was a teacher, then my law career. I tried to figure out why--when I had achieved far more than that five-year-old in Oildale or even the graduation speaker could ever have imagined—I was so miserable. Between 1973 and 1985 I went through 12 years of alternating light and dark, drank too much, wrote in my journals too much, and went to a lot of therapists. I dreamed all the time of another path, any path, of escape. Finally, in 1985 I stopped trying to escape the truth of my misery and started to climb out of a pit. I realized I had never even thought about what I wanted from my life. I had just done what I had to do to escape my mother's life. Then I had rebelled against doing that, in my late adolescence at age 35. Neither being a good girl nor not being a good girl had made me happy or been worth much. It took me another 12 years to get out of law and Los Angeles and start another life. In the meantime I got divorced again, spent too long picking wrong men while single for the first time as an adult, and then really decided to marry Peter. My third marriage was the only one when I had no reason to get married except he was the best man I had ever met and I wanted to marry him. I got certified as a Master Gardener, we both continued our studies on housing and energy, and we worked on starting a non-profit to demonstrate and educate on how to build ultra low-cost houses, grow edible landscaping, and use renewable energy. Peter built a beautiful tiny house out of recycled materials using only hand tools. We were green long before it was cool. We finally got the charity started in 2003, started building a big, gracious ultra-low cost house in 2004, and actually planted more than a token amount of edible landscaping in 2006. I felt forced by legal pushes to do what little it seemed to me I actually accomplished on my own goals. However, I did accomplish some things, for whatever reasons, and they were toward my goals, not someone else's or rebelling against someone else's. There have been five 12-year cycles since I was five. It seems to me the next one will be the best, but the last one has been good in a lot of ways too. For a long time I thought we would not survive the Bush presidency. Wiretapping Americans in America without warrants, torturing prisoners, keeping protestors away at all times—I was terrified we were being taken over by a modern-day Gestapo. I couldn't sleep for a month thinking another Republican might get elected and do more of the same, and worse. As a result the apolitical Brenda is gone forever. I read the New York Times online every day and sign every petition that comes along. We're preparing a competitive grant proposal for Obama's green energy and broadband extension stimulus package. Today I signed up for a local action council. And we're growing potatoes in garbage bags and salad greens everywhere. I realized since we are doing it all in a lightweight way with little water, that could be revolutionary. Roofs are the most underutilized space there is for growing food for ourselves, and the main problem with roof gardens has been the weight of growing media and water. In the meantime, my mother has become incapacitated with macular degeneration and pre-dementia. She's 87 and in a fog, after all these years of taking care of other people. I never could pay her back for what she did for me, but I didn't realize there wouldn't be time to even try while she was aware. At least, though, I've learned the importance of wellness practices for illness prevention, so I can pay it forward. Growing our own food without chemicals and long transportation that destroys nutrients is part of that. Life is good. Growing is good. Maybe I have not only escaped, but also learned some things about my mother's life and my own that will improve the world. I'll let you know in the next 12 years. - 30 - from Peter Naughton on Earth Day Wanting to have an expanded global consciousness today I made a special effort to become aware of planetary issues. I watched the movie For Love of Water (FLOW) this morning. (see the trailer here) I sent an email off to Autumn, our granddaughter, with a link to a project where musicians all around the world are playing music to raise our consciousness so that we can all act cooperatively- Playing for Change. Then I went off to my day job helping community development projects get chores done. In mid-afternoon, to unwind from all that, I joined Shuperman for a freshwater fishing adventure in Morongo Valley, California. Just before we started fishing President Obama made an Earth Day Proclamation. As soon as I heard that Proclamation, fishing on Earth Day began to rankle a bit on my nerves. I started thinking "I should do something that makes me think more about earth on earth day than hanging out on water's edge". The guilt was building until Shuperman started catching fish. Suddenly the old primal "gotta catch more fish than the other guy" "instinct" took over. Away went the guilt and wham!, I started changing baits from yellow to brown, brown to brown green, and brown green to PINK, yes pink, anything to catch the most fish. I had no intention of eating any fish, I just wanted to gratify my own ego about catching more than Shuperman. I could not hook one fish even. Every time they would follow my bait right up to the shore, I could see them do so in the very clean water, they would seemingly look up, see me, give me a look which implied "not you again" and turn around... leaving my pretty pink bait twirling its plastic tail like a little pink piggy tail. The mosquitoes finally got the better of us around dusk and I conceded defeat, Shuperman 6, plus 1 that got away (out of his hand), me -zero. Driving home I realized that even though our fishing venue was more of a pond than a lake, I hadn't cared, it was good enough to fish in to show who could catch the most. Suddenly I got goosebumps- "nobody", (that's me), really cares about where we do stuff anymore, we only care about looking better than the "other guy". Nobody pays any attention to where we are, (fragile planet, earth), any more, we just want to look better than the other guys! When I got home I decided to be uncomplicated about my happiness to have had such an enlightening experience of nature today- I just went and hugged our tangerine tree, spoke to our wonderful grapevines, promising to give them an extended trellis to grow over this year, and then, I kissed the earth from which our. possibly Oscar winning, potatoes have sprung. I think honoring the potato will make up to my Irish Grandfathers for using a pink bait to try to catch fish with! Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network. This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Potato Grown in Garbage Bag Makes Movie History! April 20, 2009 I am updating my log of events surrounding the Home Grown Food Network experimental house project in Desert Hot Springs, California. I was recording the fact that, while we were out of town about three weeks ago, a professional camera crew mounted a tripod, and using ladders to climb on to peer over our fence, shot some pictures of our front yard. This reminds me of my blog "Home Grown Tomato Wins Oscar". Note, we have only have two tomato plants in our front yard this year, and neither of them, in my opinion, is Oscar winning material. So why would anyone try to take pictures of our front yard without asking our permission- or worse, wait until they knew we were out of town before doing so?. We have a No Trespass notice posted in front of the project. We have supplied Management with the detailed plans that guide work on this project, so this current bout of filming is even more inexplicable. And over six foot high fences no less! It may be that the Park Management read our blog about "Growing Potatoes in a Garbage Bag" and, not liking this, hired a crew to shoot footage of our potato plant blooming in a garbage bag. Using unusual containers in 2009 gardens is part of a trend in the home gardening movement. Throughout the country, you can find everything from"old boots to birdcages " in use as containers for growing food plants. Last year Management condemned our use of a recycled birdcage to support tomato plants in our west side garden. When we pointed out that this is common practice they stated that they objected to it because the birdcage wasn't store bought, apparently insinuating that if it were accompanied by a receipt it would be ok! Perhaps Management think they might like to re-open this issue, this time using our potato growing in a recycled garbage bag as the basis for legal action! Try as I might to find a motive for hiring a camera crew I cannot do so, and, in spite of the above future legal action scenario, I tend to conclude that someone wants to make our Potato Plant into a movie star. Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Planning for People or Cameras? April 15, 2009 Now we have another sad example of a city planning goal being misused for political gain, this time in Florida. There, in the city of Riviera Beach, as reported by the New York Times , officials are seeking to ban its citizens from wearing drooping trousers! They do so because, in the words of one of the city officials, “We’re working very hard to improve the image of our city", and, "just as we can dictate the height to which certain trees can grow", so we have the right to maintain dress standards! Is this just a bit too much? Surprising as it might sound, this kind of thinking abounds among city fathers everywhere. Urban politicians are very fond of grandiose sounding goals-Planning Goals. Just thumb through any General Plan and you will find goals like- "promote a high quality of life","strengthen the community's creative and cultural identity" or "provide enriching growth opportunities for the entire community", liberally sprinkled throughout the document. "Improving", the "image" of the city falls into this category too. The dirty little secret is that city planning lacks any means by which cities can reliably reach such Planning Goals. The only means they have are "Standards" for "Guiding" "Land Use" in order to "Manage" "Development Activity", so called Development Control Standards. In the past decade, city planners across the planet have seen Development Control Standards fail miserably as the means to reach Planning Goals. Yet their silence on this failure is deafening, and has led to Development Control Standards being used for political purposes, especially in rapidly growing cities. The standards become tougher under the false flag of "needing" to be "more effective" to "change" whatever behavior it is fashionable to oppose at the time while pretending to have a planning goal at heart. "Toughening" them often means intruding on individual rights. For example, in the United States weed free ordinances were enforced to reach the common planning goal of "Making Great Places by Insisting on the Highest Standards of Quality in Architecture, Landscaping and Urban Design". Weed free ordinances were based on the concept that "a smooth closely shaven surface of grass is by far the most essential element of beauty on the grounds of a suburban house" and that "a premium needs to be placed on neatness and conformity", because neatness and conformity are accepted symbols of a thriving city! Such ordinances are still, used to stifle individual rights of self expression in landscaping. Imposing weed free ordinances, or any kind of ordinance, to promote a "good community spirit" is, at best, counterproductive, and at worst, blatant discrimination against behavior on an ethnic or class basis. Professor Kevin Lynch, in his masterpiece work,The Image of the City, stated that city dwellers create the image of the city in their own minds, each individual being entitled to their own image. I hazard a guess that he would turn in his grave to know that 21 st century urban government officials, using dress codes as their tool, are now regulating people, of a specific socio-economic status and/or ethnic background in the name of the "image of the city" with a goal of imposing one image on all, without even saying what that image is or who it is being aimed at! Perhaps at a giant roving camera in the heavens seeking out the perfect city image! Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Eating For the Cost of Food Stamps March 27, 2009 North Palm Springs, California Lately I've been amazed that so many news programs think it is difficult to eat for the cost of food stamps. Reporters make a big project of it and say they run out of food and have to eat packaged noodles that cost nine cents on sale for the last three days of the month. That may make an interesting news article, but from my experience it gives a totally false impression. Then today I got an e-mail from Mother Earth News asking people to try to feed families of four organic, sustainable food and report how they did for less than the $588 the USDA allows per month for food stamps for a family of four. Mother! How could you? Of all the people who know that growing your own food means it costs very little, certainly not $588 per month for four, I never thought Mother Earth News would think that deserved to mount a challenge. Then the first person to submit a report said a book he had read said the earth has no nutrients left in it so without chemical fertilizers meeting that challenge is impossible. He said it was especially bad in the places such as China where there are the most people, so it is just impossible to produce organic food for the whole planet for that little money. I guess that just shows you never know who reads a magazine for people dedicated to living organically and sustainably.. This is what I wrote for my report: I have never tried to buy organic food for a family of four. Now I have a family of only two plus a dog and a cat, which doesn't count as a family of four, so I can't do your challenge. However, I know from my husband and myself cooking for the two of us and preparing raw food, it costs far less than $588 a month to produce organic food in our own garden sufficient to feed eight or ten people, not just four. We have lots of guests over and take food to other people's houses for potlucks and parties, plus give away food to our neighbors and poorer people we know. This is on an urban lot of less than 1800 square feet with 1200 of that taken up by buildings and much of the rest needed to walk and park two cars on. This is also with both of us doing many types of work, mostly unpaid, that take far more time than full-time jobs, so we spend about an hour a day each average on all the gardening tasks. This is also using overripe supermarket food as our "seeds" and recycled materials we find in alleys and thrown away here and there, for our raised beds and containers. We use soaker hoses below the surface, so that requires next to no water, even here in the Mojave Desert. Since we've been doing this, only less than two years, we have been healthier and more energetic, besides spending much less on food, than ever before in our lives. Before we grew our own, when we bought all that organic produce, we had to be very efficient to buy it several times a week at farmers' markets in different parts of town in order to stay within the USDA's budget. Now we buy only meat, which we eat very little of, eggs, dairy products, and bread when we don't have time to bake our own, other than dog and cat food, which are not allowed in the USDA's budget. We spend far less than $250 per month on our food purchases, all of which are organic and bought at farmers' markets, health food stores, and Bristol Farms, which is even more expensive (and in my opinion better) than Whole Foods. We make and drink Dr. Oz's raw green drink (from the Oprah show) once per day (googling will get you the recipe). It is delicious and has more nutrients than most Americans consume in a week. We also make a green soup out of many vegetables and fruits, particularly those such as chard, collard greens, kale, tomatoes, and cabbage, which would not be so good or get boring eaten just raw. We eat that soup once or twice a day, and we love it. It is different every time because we use different greens (it's especially good with eggplant in it, and we often use broccoli, cauliflower, squashes, and all kinds of sweet and hot peppers just because we like them and they are so healthy). After cooking them in the pressure cooker for three minutes we blend them, so it tastes like creamy rich soup but has no cream, no fat, and almost no calories. We take all the supplements we can afford, such as fish oil, antioxidants, multi-vitamins, and seavegg (seaweed from Ireland). All of this is our health insurance (we have had and needed no other for 35 years), so it is worth getting and growing the best. Bill Mollison, the creator of Permaculture, an organic form of gardening where planning for synergy is the main idea, wrote that a couple can grow 80% of their food on an 8 x 10 city balcony. A man in Mumbai publishes articles on the Web about growing all the food for his large family of 15 on a 75 square foot terrace, all in containers. I don't live in China, and I am not an academic scholar about soil, but I have seen the desert soil in our yard produce bumper crops of everything with almost no effort or time invested. It appears the reason is we mulch and compost religiously. Nothing is wasted here. We shred office paper we have used on both sides (with soy ink), and that goes down for mulch. We pick up bags of produce trimming "waste" from the Bristol Farms dumpster while we are there and put that out for mulch. The soil loves it. Really, I didn't think we were so innovative or clever here at Home Grown Food Network, that academic scholars and my favorite organic lifestyle magazine would think what we have achieved would win a challenge. Actually, I still don't think we are very innovative or clever. It requires only having priorities and researching how to achieve one's goals, then applying just a little effort and time. The cost in money and the skill needed are negligible. The results are lifechanging. Brenda Barnes, President Home Grown Food Network, Inc. This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Growing Potatoes in a Garbage Bag March 24, 2009, North Palm Springs, California About three weeks ago a brochure came in the mail about a book from Rodale Press about Lasagna Gardening. We already knew the methods. They are virtally the same as permaculture, forest gardening, no-work gardening, etc., with some modifications always necessary for where the garden is and other things. We also aren't into spending money on gardening books when we have 1,000 already and broadband Internet. However, one thing mentioned was new in some ways: growing potatoes in a garbage bag. So I googled it and started on trying it the very next day. It took me about a week to get the things I needed together. These were a garbage bag, some dried eyes of the sprouted potatoes I found behind a produce market about a month ago, which (the potatoes, not the market!) I'd been saving on the kitchen island to plant, and believe it or not the hardest thing to find, enough soil to cover a few potato eyes. We compost everything, and mulch on top of the soil as we go along, but using a soaker hose below ground level makes that all compost quickly, with far less volume than it had when we started with raw materials. So with all the garden beds planted already, I had trouble finding soil to spare. Ultimately I found enough in corners and under barbecue tables. It doesn't take much, really, to fill the bottom of a garbage bag with three inches of soil. For the bag, the directions said use a particular kind of ”heavy” garbage bag. I didn't have that kind, so I double-bagged two ordinary black ones from under my kitchen sink, where I had recycled them to reuse again for trash. We don't have much trash anyway, and the development where we are growing the Home Grown Food Network demonstration garden has a common dumpster, so we just unload filled garbage bags into it and reuse the bags over and over. We end up throwing away about two every year or so, when they develop holes or something, so I had plenty. If I hadn't, I would have gone to the dumpster and unloaded some other people's trash and taken those. Overpackagaing is not just in retail products, after all. Black is important because it heats the soil, not a problem here later in the year but it's ”only” a high of 60-70 degrees days now, so not all that warm for germinating plants. There is an RV section in this development and people from Canada tell us about 50-below, which I can't even imagine. I appreciate not needing a sweater even, but germinating plants need it warmer. Then I poked a few little holes along the side of the bottom and put a few inches of soil in, enough to cover up the potato pieces. I had (and still have most of) 30 or so baby organic Yukon Gold potatoes from a bag that had sprouted every single potato before I found it. I know those potatoes did not have any anti-sprout spray on them! Then I put four of those whole in the soil in the bottom of one double bag, and dumped in a little recycled rain water from a watering can (it does rain here an average of three days a year, and I save every drop in many, many pails and buckets). Then I rolled the sides of the bag down close to where the top of the covered potatoes were and left it in the sun at the edge of the gazebo where we're creating a greenhouse. I came out in the morning and put in a little more rain water two or three more times, every three or four days. That was all. My kind of easy. This morning when I went out there to water, I couldn't believe it! Three plants about six inches high each, lush and crammed with green leaves. I was so excited, I ran to get Peter and show him he'd think he was back in Ireland. Well, one or two square feet of Ireland, anyway. The directions said as soon as the plants grow, fill them over with fallen leaves or grass clippings, so the plants keep growing up to try to reach the sun. Potatoes are tubers that form along the stems of those plants below the surface. When plants are grown in soil, you have to use more soil to make hills, and then they compact in the sun and from watering into hard enough layers that you have to use tools to find and get the potatoes out. That can damage the plants or the potatoes. I liked the idea of using lightweight covering you can dig down in with your hands. You can use that in the bag because the sides keep it from blowing or washing away. Once again, though, just as with soil, it wasn't that easy to find lots of dry coverings. We use all we have for mulch except the awful oleanders the Park has here, which we can't use because they are poison. Peter found enough dry leaves and small small twigs, though, and I covered the plants. Then I went to look at the russets I had planted in another bag in the back yard. Our dog had dug them out of the soil in the garbage bag, so I had to start over and put the bag up off the surface a little on some concrete pavers, hopefully far enough that he won't see them, since he is blind, or be able to reach them, as frail as he is. This is so much fun. I was thinking, too, we can reach in and get new potatoes as we go along instead of buying bags of potatoes that spoil before we eat them all (even if they are not already sprouted when we get them, the way overripe ones we find behind stores are likely to be). I keep buying bags because two loose potatoes cost almost as much as a bag on sale, so there never is a way to win. Growing our own allows taking a few to use at a time as they are growing, spreading the harvest over many weeks instead of having too much at once. It's the same with mesclun lettuces and spinach, tomatoes, herbs like chives, cilantro, and parsley, and aromatics like garlic and onions. Besides, the directions said 15-20 pounds grow in a bag. Not bad for no investment at all except a little time. So if you come here and see garbage bags all over, don't think we're too lazy to empty the trash. We just found more kinds of potatoes to try growing this easy, fun way. I saw some purple ones. . . I'll let you know what else we learn. Brenda Barnes, President Home Grown Food Network,Inc This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site St. Patrick's Day has to be a Happy Day! I went to a dinner in Aqua Caliente Hotel in Desert Hot Springs last night. The dinner was a fund raiser for the groups that have organized themselves to provide input into the debate about how to route The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Green Power Grid so as to minimize its unsettling impact on communities such as Morongo Valley, Pioneer Town and Desert Hot Springs in the High and Low Desert. Happily it was a well attended event, with plenty of opportunities for intermingling. While waiting in the food line at the buffet, I happened to have a fellow countryman of mine strike up a conversation with me about how nerve wracking it was to be getting ready for "St. Paddy's Day". As I love celebrating the day in the USA, I mentioned that I liked the fervor with which we throw ourselves into getting ready for it here, and that I did not find my nerves getting frayed at all. In fact, I told him, that Brenda had just researched St. Pat's life, and discovered that March 17 is the date our favorite holy man died! My newly acquainted Irish friend had never heard this before either! Naturally it was important for us to discuss at length whether it was ok to celebrate a death? Helped along by excellent food and music we agreed that the Great Saint would be happy only if we celebrated in a convincingly happy way! Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network March 15, 2009 This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Homelessness? Let It Be - 2009 version Listening to an expose of the philosophy underlying "The Rapture" recently on the Rachel Maddow show I am once more amazed at how we use stories to avoid talking about what is really going on! It reminds me of how, when I was in school in Ireland, the "Great Hunger" was explained in religious terms as Divine punishment on my ancestors for their "sins", and as Judgment against abusive landlords and middlemen! Then, in 1845, like now, there were The Powers That Be who advocated a hands-off policy (named "Laissez faire" French for "let it be") to deal with the starving and homeless in the belief that all problems would eventually be solved on their own through 'natural means!. Avoiding any interference with private enterprise or the rights of property owners then, as now, was, according to this philosophy, the only thing that mattered. The blame for the plight of tens of thousands of starving and homeless people can then be put on "the way the system works". Enforced self sufficiency is the key element here, and if "some", ( even if that amounts to thousands), people can't hack it, government can look the other way. During the Irish Famine, this philosophy resulted in a plentiful supply of food in local markets but no one had any money to buy it. It also sought to make free handouts as unattractive as possible to able-bodied Irishmen, fearing they would overwhelm the inadequate relief system. It also resulted in the government, on principle, shutting the relief system off to enforce self sufficiency! My aunt told me that the potato blight that caused the hunger was really caused by static electricity disturbing the potatoes. The static electricity was coming from all the locomotive trains of the new Irish railroad system! This latter theory was the precursor of her Sputnik theory about which I have written before. She encouraged me to not worry about what caused it but to work to prevent it from happening again, anywhere. Ireland did recover and today has a thriving economy. So does that not prove the point then? Lassez faire works! Just let it be and it will all work out by itself. Leave people subsist miserably in the streets, penniless, degraded and depressed, and after a while it will all just work itself out. They can, "eventually", get rehoused somehow, if they are the "right people", and then the "law of nature" will "do the rest"? Are we making this decision again? Take the case of Tent City in Sacramento. The Economist in a slide show about it points out that this Tent City Site 2009 is sited where homeless people camped in 1936 (more). The Mayor of Sacramento in a TV interview last week brilliantly confronted the "let's hope it all goes away naturally" philosophy which currently prevails about homelessness. He said that we’ve tried to sweep the homeless under the rug and it’s been our dirty little secret for far too long! (read the whole interview here). Homelessness has not been a secret. What is a secret though, is that land use planning deliberately excludes the homeless. The”Planned City” requires that the poor should at be best be hidden. At the Commonwealth Association of Planners conference in Sheffield, England, a few years ago, Cliff Hague created a sensation when, during a presentation on “What’s Left of Planning”, he presented a slide which typified Planning as an anti-poor practice with the slogan “Move out the trash to make the city clean and green”. Land use planning theory regards the homeless poor as an accident, or, to make it more palatable, an Act of God! Currently the poor are pushed into informal settlements that lack sufficient basic services, and safe and reliable transport linkages. These areas are also often located in the periphery of the city, at a considerable distance from employment opportunities and other social and recreational amenities. Go to any city planning commission meeting right now and you will hear planners act as surprised to find homelessness on their doorstep as if they found aliens disembarking from a newly arrived space ship. Finding "a permanent tent city for the homeless" with "sanitation services" as the Mayor said he wants to provide, need not be interpreted as an interference with private enterprise or the rights of property owners, in other words as a violation of the "let it be" philosophy. Instead it should be seen as a wakening up to the fact that no criteria for locating the poor exist. Are we going to generate these criteria now based on the facts confronting us? We have an opportunity to do so taking into account the human needs of people who are poor, irrespective of whether they are poor because of a Divine punishment on them for their "sins" or because of a Judgment against abusive bankers and middlemen, or because computers caused the stock market to crash. My Aunt, the one who convinced me that the Irish Famine was caused by static electricity from trains and not by bad and cruel ideologies, preserved me from thinking Divine Beings were out to kick us to death here on this planet. And so I am convinced a land use zoning concept that allows ultra low cost dwellings to be sited for poor people is our next breakthrough. At Home Grown Food Network we are working on creating an example of an ultra low cost house for such people to live in. All that's needed now is a secure zoning ordinance to support siting them. Peter Naughton-Manager, Home-Grown Food Network March 12,2009 This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site If You're Irish, Come Into the Garden! Although I don't want to throw a damper on anyone's enjoying a Green Beer on the upcoming St. Patrick's Day, it is sobering to realize that many countries in the world today are still battling against circumstances identical to those which caused the famine in Ireland in 1845. Reliance by the poor on a single staple crop for survival, governmental reluctance to pay for aid to the poor, widespread incurable disease, and foreign ownership of land by rich individuals set the scene for the death of almost 2 million Irish people between 1845 to 1850. As The History Place website details, these very same conditions were the basis of all the major famines of the past century throughout the world! We visited Ireland around this time a couple of years ago. Everyone there seemed very happy to make elaborate preparations for "St. Paddy's Day". Great fun was had by all as we got ready for parades and neighborhood events. We had some serious discussions about what it was St. Patrick actually did while he was in Ireland, and other topics, but those terrible years when famine killed off almost two million people still seems out of bounds as a topic for conversation there. In spite of that silence, the terrible suffering of the Irish during the Great Hunger is still somewhere in the "Irish DNA". Maybe that's what adds a joyful energy to the traditional Irish insistence that, when you visit any home there, you are obliged to join with the family for a hearty Irish meal. I love that about Ireland. The facts about world hunger are daunting, indeed they are similarly daunting about hunger in the United States. But there is no time like the present to begin. Home Grown Food Network was established not to fight the problem, but to solve it. We are encouraged by the support we get from people all around the world who believe we have the resources and the will to do so. So what has this got to do with St. Patrick's Day? I have had the pleasure recently of meeting with a few Irish students who have fanned out across the globe, not as their starving ancestors did, to find food, but to aid organized efforts to end global hunger. Through long conversations with them I sense that they are enthusiastic and confident about our ability to solve this problem. One of these brilliant young Irish workers suggested that we need to have certain days-such as St. Patrick's Day- allocated for honoring the efforts of all those who are working to fight hunger. In America alone, over 40 million people claim Irish ancestry. Millions more do so in countries all around the world. If every one of them pledged to start a vegetable patch in their back yard, and actually planted a food plant on St. Patrick's Day, we would have lots of food to show. I'm sure St. Patrick would approve. What do you think? Peter Naughton, Manager, Home Grown Food Network March 9, 2009 This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Golf! Not in My Back Yard! After I quit playing golf, I was amazed to find that neatly trimmed grass fairways still featured in my happier dreams. In them I am usually hitting a brilliant approach shot, and sometimes holing out a long putt on a perfect green to become the champ! I thought that moving to the low desert of Coachella Valley would get rid of those images-I was wrong! Perhaps that's because the Coachella Valley, being the golf mecca of the universe, is bejeweled with great golf courses. Golf is in the air here, affecting everyone differently, and you can see the evidence in the fact that thousands of golfers living here are fanatically committed to fronting their homes with neatly trimmed lawns. (perhaps to practice their long putts between games?). Now I don't want to knock golf or golfers, but since I became an avid gardener I've started thinking of new ways to use the earth around a home besides just practicing my putting on it. There is a growing opinion in favor of converting lawns, or parts of them, into gardens. In fact, as Heather Coburn observes, today, 58 million Americans spend approximately $30 billion every year to maintain over 23 million acres of lawn. That’s an average of over a third of an acre and $517 each. The lawns in the United States consume around 270 billion gallons of water a week—enough to water 81 million acres of organic vegetables, all summer long. On Victory Gardens last week the presenters declared that we use 800 million gallons of gasoline mowing domestic lawns in the United States every year, and that lawn chemicals are causing a growing number of respiratory defects in children. (more) I am not a reformed golfer, because reformed golfers are more anti-golf than golf widows. I'm not saying ban golf from yards altogether, but I think some new way of being more flexible about how we use the ground around our homes is evolving in the public consciousness, and as a golfer I venture to say that the time has come to yield some ground to my gardening buddies. Home Grown Food Network has as its mission to be a focus for how we can renew our connection with the Earth and each other, and thus benefit through increased physical and mental health, an improved natural environment, and stronger local communities. Growing food for one another in our backyards is a first step along this path and judging from discussions already underway it provides an excellent opportunity to have fun. Peter Naughton, Manager, Home Grown Food Network March 4, 2009 This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site There's No Way to Blow It While reading David Wann's The Zen of Gardening in the High and Arid West I was inspired by its directions to use every opportunity to gather cold weather shelter for seeds from wherever you find them, even when that includes what others have thrown away. While doing that a few months ago we found a hybrid verbena that seemed dead in its pot. We took it back to the yard and we planted it beside our fence. Wonder of wonders it has just bloomed, and as you can see, it brings a splash of exciting color there. Now I feel as if this is one more piece of evidence that my formerly "black thumb" has just turned into a green one! What I love about David Wann's book (preview here) is the simple joy with which he describes his adventures in the garden. His writing captures the magic of the human experience of our relationship with nature through planting,-it seems that in it we humans cannot lose. Even if nothing happens to my seedlings I still have hope that something will, and if they grow I feel I have a winner on my hands! In the case of the hybrid verbena, we snatched it from the jaws of death, and now, with Mother Nature's blessing, it is alive again! Indeed there's no way to blow it! Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network. March 2, 2009 This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Good crops and The Panic of 1873 Surprisingly, economic historians are currently battling it out on whether the "circumstances" we are in now resemble those of The Great Panic of 1873 more than those of the Great Depression of 1929 or for that matter the 1983 recession! (more). As economics has forever suffered from a lack of identity as either an art or a science, and as I spent years of my life dutifully absorbing its "theories", I will take the liberty of artfully plucking from the writing about that "event" the diagnosis that The Panic of 1873 came to an end quickly because, "as the sun always shines after rain.......the fertile lands of the West and South brought forth bountiful harvests, and ocean commerce expanded under the stimulus of good crops " (you can read a more scientific analysis of what other circumstances surrounded the end of that event here and some academic writing about it here ) Whether we decide to call this a Panic or a Depression, experts are now saying that it is not the economy we have to worry about being depressed, it is people. They say we have to create new resources for people to use in these times of difficulty to reassure themselves of their own value and worth as vital elements of our ecosystem. As I wrote a few months ago, the creation of mental capital is as important as capital in a bank. A suggestion is being made that we give tax breaks to people to encourage them to encourage environmentally friendly and healthy food production. The plan would be based on the current practice of offering a tax deduction for the square footage of a home office, except that instead of a home office it would be a home garden!: the bigger the garden, the better the tax break. Those with no yard could deduct the rental fee for a community garden plot. (more on The Great Big Food Garden Tax Break and Stimulus Package) The more the interest in the scheme the greater the incentive there would be for community gardens! Given that all the stories that are being wheeled out of the dusty folklore of the previous depressions/panics are depressing, I think we have a duty to show how innovative we are as a generation so that future generations can feel happy at least hearing about how we coped. Organizing into a super efficient food producing nation through a grassroots/veggie roots movement would be a good start. Home-Grown Food Network includes such activities in its mission! Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network. This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Solar Water Heater for less than $5! Kate Melua has a song that begins with the improbable statistic, "there are nine million bicycles in Beijing, that's a fact', which I would love to challenge, but I always let her go with it-after all I have never been to China and I am enchanted by her voice. Here is another statistic from that mysterious country. At least 30 million Chinese households have a solar thermal system; and, 4 of every 5 systems sold in the world in 2005 were in China (more). In fact 80 percent of percent of the global market share for solar hot water is owned by China! Will we ever catch up with them? Using the inscrutable logic of a Chinese sage who said that the longest journey begins with a single step I think if I can build my own solar heater I will have started this long journey!. Here is a guide on how to build your own system for less than $5! I love that it uses materials recycled from thrown away refrigerators. Now that the new President has had THE 100 DAY ACTION PLAN TO SAVE THE PLANET (get a sneak preview here) set out for him, I feel glad that I am not in his shoes because it is difficult to know where to start with this. In these times when everything that needs to be done costs billions or trillions I feel consoled by the cost of my adventure into solar energy costing only $5. And who knows after I do this one I might be willing to teach someone else how to do it. And after that we might even have a forum for solar water heater builders! Peter Naughton, Manager Home Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Low Income Solar Farmers? While reading the 2005 Energy Policy Act summary in wikipedia today, I momentarily wished I lived in Colorado where, unlike other states, they actually pay cash for you to supply solar energy to the utility company. (more) This 2005 Energy Policy Act has a provision in it to allow independent power producers-you, the homeowner- to connect to the utility grid and requires utility companies to purchase your excess electricity. To implement this provision 30 states allow what is called "net metering" which is a way your home's solar system’s electricity production can be valued. In this way you-the homeowner- should receive the full value of the electricity. However, only Colorado's solar farmers get cash, all other states are return the value through a system of credits. The most common method for "net metering" is a single, reversible meter. As your home's solar system produces electricity, the kilowatts are first used to meet on site demand for lights and appliances. Then, instead of going into a battery storage system, any extra kilowatts feed into the grid, turning your, the homeowner’s, electric meter backwards!. At the end of each metering period, the utility company credits you for the extra kilowatts, "paying out" either monthly or annually. To qualify for net metering, systems have to be less than 1 megawatt in size. And net metering does not allow customers to sell electricity to the grid! Oh, I almost forgot- credits left at the end of one year cannot be rolled into the next! Given all the above restrictions, it is not surprising that few experts claim that you might ever do better than get your money back on your original investment in the system. The most common prognosis is that that will take between 8-20 years! And so there is no big rush to go small scale solar. In fact last year in California's less than two thousand solar powered homes were connected to the grid! Even commercial customers of US utilities that generate their own electricity from systems larger than a megawatt won’t get credits for any excess power they generate.(Unless they want to go through what one observer calls "a bureaucratic/ utility company squeeze play").This effectively inhibits anyone wanting to supply power into the grid. How do we change this? The answer is feed-in tarriffs These obligate national/regional/local utilities to buy solar energy at above market rates set by the government, and if European experiences are anything to go by, people are encouraged by the resulting opportunity to make money by reselling solar power to the grid. Solar power is a burgeoning source of energy and private income there. There are now 170,000 people involved in this kind of enterprise in Germany alone. (more). It has all the characteristics of a grassroots movement. The opportunity for German home owners to use their own solar power installations to make a profit from it is bringing more and more of them into the renewable energy grid. The same could happen in this country. Feed in tariffs are the way to turn low cost dwellings into mini solar farms! Low income families who become solar farmers could easily become income producers. And prove that you don't have to be wealthy to have an eco friendly lifestyle. Peter Naughton Manager, Home-Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Affordable Housing or Couch Potatoes? In the early sixties we were taken aback when Marshall McLuhan declared that it did not matter if television broadcasted children's shows or violent programming, the effect of television on society would be identical! (Understanding Media). Back then we used to joke around more about stuff like that and so we named the "effect" of television on society, "couch potatoism" . I believe that the same principle is at work when professionals discuss certain topics. Using McLuhan's terminology, the topic, like the television medium, always produces the same outcome-not "couch potatoism", but something similar, inertia. Take topics like land use planning and affordable housing for example. It does not matter whether affordable housing is being analyzed by professionals or amateurs, in a verbal discussion or a written exchange, in a conference or on television, in a council meeting or in a clubhouse lounge, the available language constrains the discussion and makes the participants walk along a path that moves backwards so the discussion stays in the same place! Take for example the National Priorities Project Federal Budget Trade-Offs page. On this page you are invited to select your state, town, county or congressional district and a program to find out what else the tax dollars from your selected area could provide other than on a current Federal spending program. I selected Riverside County, California, where taxpayers will pay $608.5 million for tax cuts for the richest 10% in FY 2009. The web page then calculates that for the same amount of money, 1,822 Affordable Housing Units could be provided. That works out at $333,973 per unit! Now don't get me wrong. I applaud the National Priorities Project. I am a long time admirer of NPP's contribution to making numbers be human. Their problem is that there is no data available on which a definition of affordable might be based and they did what they could. ( I highly recommend their website) Last year an article was published stating the extent of the growth of poverty in this country. It stated "According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 16 million households “either paid more for rent than the federal government says is affordable, or lived in overcrowded or substandard housing.” Of these, six million allocated half their income for rent or utilities or lived in severely sub-standard housing". and four million of these households included families with children. (more) In spite of this evidence we are still in a professional conspiracy to prevent anybody saying they know who would want to live in affordable housing. Nobody is therefore able to find a site for these houses. Naturally it comes as no surprise that nobody will admit they have an image of what an affordable house might look like. Home-Grown Food Network is joining with others around the world in launching a concept called the under $20,000 house. We do so in the certain knowledge that a real concrete example of a low cost house, a house that actually costs less than $20000, will help low income families break out of the current "see no need, speak no need" cage that professional jargon has used to create and not solve the problem of homelessness. Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site First Time Homebuyers Credit The Senate is considering whether to increase the first time home buyers credit from $7500 to $15000, and to make it a straight credit and not a repayable loan. The fate of that measure is in the balance.(more) It crossed my mind that first time home buyers might be able to use that credit to move into low cost homes. For example what if one of them were to buy a house for zero money down , escrow closes and they move in and then start making payments with a deal that the new home owner will give the seller the First Time Home Buyer Credit when they get is as a delayed down payment? Allowing the credit to be used in this way might free some ideas currently trapped in the reign of terror currently pervading discussions of how to deal with the tsunami of homelessness. I have been told by friends who have lost their homes in the last week that the financial institutions now don't even want to discuss how they might work out an agreement to stay in their homes. I watched a show about The Trashout Squads who are being called in to clean out houses hurriedly vacated by homeowners foreclosed on. You can see that vast amounts of useful household furniture, appliances and electronics are being hauled off to the landfills because homeowners are fleeing. Who knows what frame of mind those people are in, but I would hazard a guess that they are deeply unhappy at being thrown into the prison of poverty. Doubtlessly financial and/or government eyebrows will be raised at a strategy to use the first time home buyer credit this way. But in the stirring words of the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, "lasting peace can not be achieved unless large population groups are provided with ways in which to break out of poverty". This credit may be a hybrid micro credit and could be one such means. Clearly the failure of financial and land use planning institutions to do anything but exacerbate the current stunning increase in homelessness is a signal to call a halt to the mindless adulation of "their professional sensitivities". And not worry too much about arching eyebrows! Peter Naughton, Manager, Home Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site King Carrot's birthday bash My sixtieth birthday arrived last week and I wanted to spend the day doing all the activities I would like to occupy my next forty years with...like growing food in our yard, and nourishing its soil. But what should I plant in my yard? I chose carrots although I don't know why I made that choice. Before I made the decision I went through our carefully maintained seed collection, bypassing cauliflower, spinach, and collard greens, and without hesitation picked out the pack of carrot seeds. It was only while planting the seeds that I remembered that my first theatrical role was as King Carrot. I was only five years of age, and had participated in a parade and won a prize for my costume. It consisted of two giant carrots cut out of carrot colored cardboard, which I wore like a sandwich board! To win the admiration of my fans I wore a crown of green like the green shoots of the carrot (or it might have been green and gold). Afterward I paraded around our orchard where I knew nobody would see me, imperiously stretching my arm over my "vast kingdom", and in the deepest voice a five year old boy could have, I would say to the unflinching Irish countryside-”I see all of this filled with carrots subject to my rule!” What a hoot! Perhaps that's the reason why now, 6,000 miles away from that orchard in Donegal, Ireland, I chose carrots to honor my birthday! A symbol of my dedication to having a kingdom of carrots, but as it is in America, I will treat them as partners and not as my subjects! Peter Naughton, Manager, Home Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Poverty is created by who? January 1, 2009 While discussing our resolutions for 2009 the 16 Decisions of Grameen Bank frequently come up. Here are three of them:- Decision 3: We shall not live in dilapidated houses. We shall repair our houses and work towards constructing new houses at the earliest. Decision 4: We shall grow vegetables all the year round. We shall eat plenty of them and sell the surplus. Decision 5: During the plantation seasons, we shall plant as many seedlings as possible.(read all 16 decisions here) The founder of Grameen Bank, Professor Yunus, recently said, "I believe that not only is poverty the most pressing issue of our time, I also believe, at the same time, that it is a problem that we have fully the capacity to tackle and overcome within the first half of this century - if only we choose to do so" (more) True. It is obvious that poverty is not created by poor people, and in order to overcome it we have to go back to the drawing board and redesign our concepts and institutions, and make it easier for poor people to interface with them. Poor people are endowed with the same unlimited potential of creativity and energy that any human being in any station of life, any where in the world is endowed with. It is a question of removing the barrier in front of the poor people to unleash their creativity to solve their problems. Home Grown Food Network throughout 2007 and 2008 has documented that barrier "in play". We look forward to continuing to overcome it. Peter Naughton Manager, Home Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Homeless get Free Voicemail December 13 Poor people are getting rough treatment "out there". Residents consider the homeless to be "washashore" people attracted by a Field of Dreams-- the "if you built it, they will come" state of being that can only be ended by eliminating services for homeless people.(more). Now in the United States the federal government has an official warning out there that terrorists may pose as homeless people to conduct clandestine surveillance of buildings and mass transit stations! (So instead of being appalled when we see homeless people on our streets we are encouraged to be suspicious of them!). While I was waiting for a bus in Abilene, Texas, lately I saw a terrific article about homelessness in a local newspaper. The article quoted a local public official as saying that " a lot of people think homeless people are nothing....they're not all there." Ghosts? Maybe that explains why land use planners are so reluctant to factor in zones for low cost housing in their land use plans- ghosts don't need land! Land use planners are not the only professionals who act surprised if you talk about the needs of the poor. Attorneys providing legal help for low income people say the legal profession acts surprised too. One attorney said he often is met with disbelief when he tells people that he is a lawyer for the homeless! He explained that there's no concept of the legal difficulties faced by people either homeless or on the road to homelessness. (more). Ghosts don't need legal briefs! As I wrote a few months ago, poor people sleep in makeshift cardboard shelters at night, and in the morning their shelters are swept away by cleanup crews with dumpsters and water hoses. By the time we walk the streets to our work they are gone. Hidden from our view they shuffle around disconnected from our world. Even when we do want to connect with them by phone, to call them back to offer a job, or food or whatever, it has been impossible to do that up to now. Now Google has stepped in. This excellent company unveiled a plan to provide free voice mail for homeless people to enable them to leave a phone contact number for potential employers or other agencies to make it easier for themselves to be reached whenever needed (full story). I hope land use planners follow the lead that Google is giving. As well as a phone number, poor people need toilets, houses, transportation, gardens, and work. Treating them like ghosts and then blaming them for being "a potential nuisance" is avoiding the problem. The”Planned City” up to now requires that the poor should at best be hidden, or at worst swept away. How about housing them on properly planned sites? One of the goals of Home-Grown Food Network is to improve public understanding of how the supply of low cost housing can be increased. Low cost housing is an essential part of any strategy for helping homeless people to get connected. We know there is a vast reservoir of talent, resources and good will ready and set to go forward to make this happen. Google's free voicemail gift proves that point. This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Birds and butterflies December 5 When I went to where the car was parked under our grapevine covered arbor last week I noticed there was a small dove resting peacefully on the roof of the car. This graceful little bird did not move even when my face was level with its head less than a foot away! It, I believe, looked into my eyes and remained so still I thought it was injured! So I cupped my hand to see if I could touch it, lift it, and help it recover, but, as soon as I reached my cupped hand towards it, it showed me that it was perfectly able to fly! It fluttered off calmly, stopping to perch on the canopy over our back door from which vantage point it viewed me. I was suddenly aware that I had never been so close to a wild bird before. It had been a wonderful moment. We have a roadrunner that visits our yard every day. It came into our kitchen one morning and perched on our water filter jug while I was on the phone. I was participating in a teleconference at the time! When the other participants started hearing loud banging and clattering in the background they asked me if I was ok. Knowing I was talking to a pretty straight lace gathering of business nerds I decided to tall them my cat was on the counter knocking things over. I could feel a few virtual eyebrows being raised even with that story If a cat in the office was a stretch for them, imagine how a roadrunner fluttering around looking for something steady enough to perch on would have affected them! A few months ago we bought some great passion fruit vines in Home Depot. (I think the plants almost asked us to buy them-but that's another blog) We planted them and they flourished. Then caterpillars descended on them and have now almost eaten them to a shred. This is sad. However we have butterflies everywhere in our front yard. What a beautiful sight they are. I love to sit out in the mid morning sunlight and watch them, or even sometime ( I must admit) try to get close enough to them that they might touch me as they fly by in their airborne cavorting. We have two humming birds that visit our yard regularly every morning. I love to marvel at their wonderful manner of flight, they seem almost magical to me as they pause in mid-air looking at something that interests them, only to quickly decide to move off with a sudden change of elevation and a brilliant burst of speed. That's some of my evidence for saying we have developed a natural habitat around our house. We might even certify it online through the NWF Certified Wildlife Habitat process. In any event these playful encounters with wild life are much more intense than any I've ever had in public parks, or while growing up on an island, and convince me that having a private fenced yard is a necessity for renewing ones relationship with nature on a daily basis. This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Veggies rock! November 29 When Joe Miller, the owner of Miller Farms in Platteville, Colo., said he would give away free vegetables on his farm, an estimated 40,000 people showed up to pick the veggies themselves. Interestingly, all the media reports of this extraordinary event hardly mentioned the feelings of those people who showed up to pick the fields clean. The media reports instead focused on the traffic congestion and parking problems caused by this turnout! The comments made on the story on one news site seem to bicker about the motives of the people who showed up to get the free food. Some commentators judged the pickers to be freeloaders! However one commentator did mention that those who showed up were not people asking for a hand out, but said that they were (people) willing to drive miles and work to gather what had gone unharvested and would go to waste. The experience Home-Grown Food Network is having confirms that observation. We have found that people do want to be involved in the process of providing food for themselves, and they are happily willing to get involved in the process of growing their own food so that they can harvest it themselves. Although to date the only yardstick being used to measure the inadequacy of the current food supply for cash strapped people in the United States is to harken back to 1929, there is no need to use that memory also as the one that conditions our response to a shortage in 2008. We can do better in the new century. Now is the opportunity to harness a growing community awareness of the resources available in each locality to grow abundant food. We do have the space to grow food in every community. Programs to encourage those who want to produce food for themselves and others in their community instead of taking handouts might even allow hungry people to sidestep the depression that overcomes humans who feel they are helpless victims of "the inadequate food supply system". Up to now critics of community gardens and gardeners have been fond of saying that people are not that interested in calling vegetables "food". I think the enthusiastic showing at the Miller farm last weekend puts an end to that myth! Peter Naughton Manager, Home Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Building an earth wall November 24 Having a difficult time carving out an intimate area to enjoy in your garden? Interested in a fascinating project that you can do as and when you have time? Then build a wall! Why? Any fence around your small garden space encloses the area and gives added possibilities for climbing plants and vines. It provides privacy too, and that allows you to make mistakes in private and take your time to fix them in a dignified way. As people age, many find themselves living in small spaces. That can happen too when they downsize their lifestyle due to the vicissitudes of modern economics! Baby boomers and seniors or those who have had to give their large houses back to the bank might find themselves in a smaller house with a smaller yard. If gardens have always been an important part of your life, why abandon this tradition? Why not be adventurous and build a wall as one of your boundaries. We did and to our surprise our rammed earth wall turned out to be a fun way to create a barrier and it also provided a thermal mass element that has helped to create a micro climate around it in which a wider variety of plants and flowers have started to grow than otherwise would without it! Below is a journal of the construction. July 1: The foundation for the wall has been in place for weeks, Brenda set it up and it was waiting for concrete. Today I got some recycled metal fence posts and put them in place as posts to add strength to this 8 foot high wall. I got out our cement mixer (video) and mixed up 20 shovels of earth and 2 shovels of Portland cement, sprayed the forms, which we intend to use again, with cooking Pam, and poured the first layer of cement on June 16. I have had some experience at pouring concrete in hot weather ( it is always hovering at 102 degrees now), so after this first pour I made sure it stayed moist by sprinkling it with water from a kids watering can on the hour for the first five hours. After two days I removed the forms and lo and behold we had the first layer of the wall. July 4: Layer with raw eggs mixed into the mixture poured July 4 came out half inch wider than the one below it and it has dimples in it. I notice that the very first layer has a smooth finish and I think that is because I sprayed the forms with spam before I poured any concrete in there. Interesting. July 7: No eggs, completed work at 7.55 pm. I added extra concrete mix from mix bought, and sprayed forms with spam. July 13 -I added another layer, this time some of the soil had left over very old compost in it. I used the Home Depot tuille to get the corners where the form has not been able to reach for at least two layers, and for which I used wire mesh up to now. This layer has no eggs in it and I did not use any spam. I removed the forms after 24 hours. It is drying although the humidity has been ranging in the high thirties these last few days, and we had rain on July 15 in the night around 1 am. July 18 I added another layer. It contained about two shovels of left overs that had hardened in the mixer. I used tuille to fill in the parts the form did not reach. I added 25 shovels, two of cement and one of mix in= 50+22 for the last batch plus three shovels= 75 shovels altogether of dirt, plus 7 of cement and four of mix that I mixed in the box to finish it. That's more than at the first layer. It took 1.75 hours for the layer all in-making the form etc. July 19-removed the forms -it is drying out ok. July 22: I added a new layer with some composting material included in this layer. Now the wall is 50" high, the target is to get it up to 72"- I started running out of concrete and used extra concrete mix in the last batch of concrete/earth i.e -2 shovels mix, 1 concrete and 25 shovels of earth, instead of the usual 2 concrete, i mix and 25 shovels earth. I notice that the wall seems to be developing itself in a slant towards the house-I am thinking this because one of the steel posts I embedded seems to be getting closer to one edge - the east one- than the other even though it started out being equidistant from both. To date I have used 2 bags Portland cement, and I have now bought 3 bags of concrete mix. I extended the legs for the forms, but I need to do a more improved job on the forms now because the one on the east side is wobbly and at the end of its leg. July 27: Put new legs on the forms yesterday, so now they are all tall enough to get us up to the 8 foot height the wall is going to. July 28: I made a new layer today, but because the height I am pouring the concrete at is now easily 4 foot off the ground I decided to use a chair to stand on to lift the mixed concrete out of the mixer from. I had to add in more tuile today because I am trying to adjust the width to even it out so that the east side gains a bit and the west loses, so it is all getting really artsy. I am digging into the gazebo area a bit more to get the earth, and I began to feel that I am intruding on the roots of the tree that grows on the south of the gazebo. I used the same mix as before 2 conc, 1 mix and 25 of earth. The earth today has more leaves than ever before. I used almost two cans of water, and that certainly is enough to get the mix wet. I allowed the mixer to run longer than before on each mix and that seems to make a better mix. July 29: I added the upper part of the layer I did yesterday to fill up the form. This is the first time i have added to a layer which I know was not dry. I used less water this time than before 1.75 watering cans for each mix load-there were only two loads, because the depth of the fill was less. I also strengthened the corners of the form using tuille taped to the form wherever there was a gap between the walls of the forms. This is proving to be an excellent way to stop mix from leaking through wherever the walls of the form are not tight enough to hold the mix inside it. I have really begun excavating our gazebo area now to provide the earth. I plan to replace the earth there with mulch and compost so that any tree roots that are getting exposed won't be. The mix is the same today as before 2 cement, 1 concrete mix, and 25 earth. Quite a few leaves and small tree roots in the earth, I handpicked some out but this time the earth has more organic solids than ever before. August 1: I counted the layers and today I added layer 13. This time I used a small table to stand on to lift the mix out of the mixer. The wall is really looking tall now. I found a mango seed in the mix and even though it was dried out and had cement mix in it I decided not to let it stay in the mix in case the wall would sprout a tree! I used a watering can and a half per 25 shovel mix (25 earth, 2 cement, 1 concrete mix). I packed it down with more force because I wanted to spread the forms apart - they had started to come together -I think they are warping from the constant wetting and drying over the past two months. I used tuille at the corners on the south side and the cardboard on the north side corners to make up for the fact that the forms have gaps at the corners now. Wherever there is a gap in the forms I use tuille to fill them in-it works great. August 2: I did layer 14 which is the last one I can do standing on the table as a platform from which to unload the mixer. I will now put another platform under the table to give me the extra height for layer 15. I finished bag #3 of concrete mix, and I am half way through bag #3 of Portland cement. I used the same mix as always and the same quantities of earth-70 shovels of earth. I was thinking while I was finishing this layer about the people who built the great walls in the world-how interesting it is to have it become something useful. I think this wall is going to look beautiful in this setting, shading and providing solar energy for plants in its environs. So suddenly, instead of just regarding this wall as "a thing/chore" I am beginning to give it some greater value! August 14: I did a very shallow layer today-about 2 inches only. That took 45 shovels of dirt , five of Portland cement and 1 of concrete mix because I ran out of concrete mix. This is a thin layer because I had to create a tall platform to stand on to unload the cement from the mixer so that it would not be such a huge lift up to the top of the form and into it. I was experimenting with my body to see how it would cope with the stresses of doing it without having to do a huge amount of labor. It took me an hour to finish the job. I was tired, but I am really happy that I have started the final ascent to the top! It took me about twenty minutes to cut the tuile to act as the form filler wherever it looked that the form might allow some of the mix to ease its way underneath it and out onto the ground. This works perfectly to stop that happening. I used recycled water from our kitchen sink to mix in with the mud! This happened because last week our drain in the kitchen slowed down and while I was waiting for it to clear itself I started using less water because I had no place to drain it to. Then I started having a garden watering can in the kitchen to put the dishwashing water that was used into. We use a biodegradable washing up liquid _Seventh Generation-and so I had a few can fulls of that on hand and used it. We'll see in a couple of days how that affects our finished layer! Sept 1-Labor DayI completed this layer-I'll call it # 15, but actually 14 was a small layer basically only to seal up the base where the form was not fitting properly. Then we had a legal issue that diverted us from this project-to do with the work we are doing here of course-see the site we have about this-and so I stopped work on the project temporarily. Anyway we had a big storm here twice in the last few weeks and the earth that i used in this layer was wetter than any other time, so I found myself using less water in the mix. The wall is now 6' tall and to do this layer I was really standing on my toes to finish filling the form! I used some recycled water from the sink waste again because our drain is blocked, and I saved some of it to put in the wall again. I opened a new bag of concrete mix for this layer. The Portland cement bag which was about 3/8 full got a bit wet in the rain but is still usable although I think I lost about 1/8 to the moisture that seeped through the plastic sheet I used to protect it. And that was after I went to all the trouble of covering it up with two layers of plastic. This makes me so grateful for living in the desert where the air is dry-although in the last two weeks we have had unusually high humidity! Anyway I am very excited now that we have got to this point with the wall and I am looking forward to giving it a coat of stucco. November 13: Today I took the form off the last layer and so the wall is now ready to be stuccoed. There was a roadrunner settled there within a few minutes of my taking away the form. I have an image. I need to put a little structure-like a small pyramid around the central steel support pole that is embedded in the wall-to give it that polish to finish it off. It has taken us five months to get to this stage! Every minute of it has been fun. The wall creates a wonderful sense of enclosure for the courtyard we are creating as a gathering area for the open air dining room. This project has as its goal to provide a meeting venue for Home Grown Food Network, and it is looking like we will have room to accommodate at least 70 people in this area very soon. Exciting progress indeed. Peter Naughton Manager, Home-Grown Food Network Mental Capital November 20 This morning I noticed the first tomato ( bottom right of pic beside the 11 of the date ) of our latest crop on a vine that survived the very hot summer we had here. On closer inspection of this hardy vine I noticed several more are growing there. "So much for the great depression", I thought, " I can grow tomatoes and stay alive- no matter what!" In the past few months of economic turmoil academic economists, sociologists, and psychologists have been busy studying the effects of debt and associated circumstances on the mental health of nations. In fact the proliferation of these studies is giving rise to the term “mental capital”, which they liken to a bank account of the mind. Economists are now saying that we need to ask what actions can add to that bank account, and what activities can erode that capital! One of these studies to which 400 scientists from around the world contributed, led to a report that recommends including gardening in a “five-a-day” program of social and personal activities that can improve mental well being, much as eating fruit and vegetables enhances physical health! According to the argument in the report the happier people are the less likely they are to be ill and a burden on others. After my discovery of our new tomato I spent a few hours of working online and monitoring current events on TV - deflation, inflation, the stock market fall, the unemployed, job losses to come, global warming. I felt so puzzled, distracted and powerless over these events that I decided to head back out to the yard to thin our new tomato plants! I finished that chore and then decided to put up more supports for the sweet potato vines that are flourishing around the south entrance to the yard. I noticed that a peaceful easy feeling had come over me while I was working- I forgot about time and was concentrating on the growth and abundance all around me in the garden. I suddenly remembered a wonderful article about the therapeutic value of gardening which a psychologist friend of ours had pointed out to me- Psychiatrists sow seeds of good mental health- and especially the opinion expressed there that tending plants increases a gardener's "sense of trust, openness, and orientation to reality." Experiencing a sense of trust is a very valuable experience. I want it to count as a deposit in my own mental capital bank account! Home-Grown Food Network is based on the concept that a network of mentally fit gardeners can become their own food banks, and, who knows, even become daily depositors in the new Mental Capital Account of the nations they garden in! Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Saying "Sayonara" to stress November 14 I apologize for seeming trivial in these stress laden times, but, no matter how confused I am after watching "the experts"pontificate about "how to get out of the mess we're in" on television, I still experience a sense of calm and inner peace when I walk out into our yard. A beautiful deep green pepper plant is thriving near where our water hose sprang a small leak, new tomato plants are sprouting up in profusion, and trees are developing new branches that leave a new pattern of shade and light on the ground. I usually go out in the yard looking for what I need to do next to make it more accessible for visitors who want to view our work here. I never go out into all its beauty looking for peace and calm. Yet I am always amazed at how quickly an awareness of the ability of nature to make things grow comes over me there. I was reading an interesting letter published in Zimbio a few weeks ago about how easy it is nowadays to forget the "meaning of life" in our fast moving world. Written by a hedge fund manager who retired to get time to repair his health, which was "destroyed by the stress I layered onto myself', he gives an insiders view of why we now need "whole" people to come on board to design a " a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man’s interest, while at the same time creating rewards great enough to attract the best and brightest minds to serve in government roles without having to rely on corruption to further their interests or lifestyles. ...... I believe there is an answer, but for now the system is clearly broken." (read the entire letter here). Our retiring hedge fund manager says that as "nearly everyone will be forgotten" we should "give up on leaving our mark, throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life". At Home-Grown Food Network we believe that life on a low income is going to become the most common experience for millions of families in the next few years. We are committed to demonstrating sustainable lifestyles for low income families by growing food at home in urban settings with access to broadband, so that while they might not have Blackberry's to throw away, they will retain a relationship with cyberspace balanced by a ready access to the calming influence of their own backyards! Peter Naughton Manager, Home-Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Blaming Bush for "The Troubles" October 10 I was growing up in rural Ireland when the Russians first put their Sputnik spacecraft into space, and, my aunt started blaming everything bad that happened on the Russians. If we had bad weather, small potatoes in our yard, a cranky cow, or chickens who laid few eggs-she used to blame it all on the Sputnik. This was very amusing to me of course because I had endless fun imagining little Russian astronauts sending morse code radio signals to our chickens who dutifully decoded them in our barnyard and stopped laying eggs as instructed by the (Source) Russians! Now that we are in the middle of "The Troubles/Unusual Times", it seems you would not be a human if you did not find someone to blame. So, as expected, we have millions of people looking around for a "blamee". Some say its "the Prez", others,"The Fedz", and the End Timers blame, "The Force". Now I ask you, what effect are these blame thought waves having on the eco system? In 1968 researchers at Temple Buell College, Colorado, measured the effects of music on plants. They exposed them to different tones and frequencies. Their findings were amazing! Exposure to heavy metal music made the plants tilt in the opposite direction or die, whereas classical music lulled the plants to lean toward the speakers. Are we not thinking heavy metal right now? (more). But how can we stop ourselves? On Black Monday, October 19, 1987. the Stock Market crashed. Nobody knows why it happened. My aunt, in a characteristically euphemistic way called it a Stock Market Bump, and as usual, blamed it on the Sputniks. Although I do not believe in challenging my elders about their theories of the universe, blaming it on the Russians 35 years after the Sputnik was launched into space was too much and I said so. She smiled at me and said "better to send the blame into space than keep it on the ground". Good point! A couple of months ago we planted Passion Fruit vines. I love the way they grow-the flowers look like tiny replicas of radio telescopes and in full bloom the flowers on vines become array antennae like those at SETI in New Mexico. They are so adaptable to their environment and have such lovely leaves. And perhaps beam out the blame and receive back energy and optimism to rise to new challenges? Brenda created a beautiful sign using one of the flowers as a template. As you can see, the sign says "We Grow Passion Fruit, We Grow Passion, We Grow." Home Grown Food Network is based on the belief that we can grow together, even while "under siege by Sputniks". Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site SLAPPs and Bogus Claims: Legal Progress in Building the Under $20,000 House August 6, 2008 Brenda Barnes, President, Home Grown Food Network, Inc. As I've written before, at least one of us had to stay here at all times this summer at the Home Grown Food Network demonstration house near Palm Springs, in a mobilehome park in Desert Hot Springs, California. All summer I've been in Arizona (which is even hotter and more humid, it seems to me—freaky weather everywhere), most weekdays and home weekends. This week what I was doing there on a real estate project stalled so much I couldn't stand staying there for no reason by myself, so I came home Tuesday night. I wanted to see the progress Peter told me on the phone he was making on our house, which we decided a few weeks ago is most accurately called “the under $20,000 house.” I also expected to be served before now with an unlawful detainer action as to which a response is due quickly, so I figured I'd better be here. I've written before about how since we started the lawsuit for damages against the park owners in June 2006 for interfering with how we are remodeling our house, and for retaliating against us for going to the government about that interference and numerous violations of our rights like trespassing, they are getting more and more desperate trying to find some violation we are committing of park rules so they could first, get an injunction against our doing that. So far they have not been successful in doing that in two years of trying. The idea of getting an injunction against us clearly was that they were hoping a court would issue such a general injunction that we would then violate it and they could evict us easily for violation of the injunction. What actually happened, even though the law for evicting people states--as is plenty obvious to anyone, even these people who do not seem to be able to read a law to save their lives--eviction is more serious than getting an injunction, now they served a 60-day notice in May that they will try to evict us if we don't move ourselves and our home by the end of that time. It was obvious from the beginning that they were not really trying to get either an injunction or evict us for violating park rules or the California state administrative regulations applying to mobilehomes that the Mobilehome Residency Law allows them to use. I had not been a tenant except in rent-controlled apartments in Santa Monica owned by law office clients—hardly a situation where a lawyer has to worry about being evicted—since I was a college student in the early 60s. I had represented landlords in rent control administrative cases for 15 years and been both a landlord and an investor in housing for millions in profits for over 30 years, so by that time my point of view was pretty much on the side of landlords. I thought tenants destroyed property values and there were far too many hindrances on landlords being able to control them. Then I had two landlords in a row try to evict me for totally bogus reasons, and both of them lied about serving papers on me and such things, as tenants had always seemed to claim happened when I was helping landlords but I did not ever believe the tenants. A friend of mine always said, “All tenants are scum,” when I would be telling a story about what some tenant said in a case, and there are all kinds of legal presumptions such as presuming correctness of a sworn process server's statement, that make it difficult to prove such statements are lies. It seems to me now a very sad case of unfair karma that the same systemic disbelief of tenants and holding of stereotypical beliefs to hurt them have made life so difficult for us. I didn't know I was misjudging a whole class of people and making my living in a system that just bulldozed their rights, no matter what laws said. It doesn't seem fair to have to pay for my ignorance then, now. However, when I think about it more, it hasn't been so bad. The two landlords did not succeed, since I am, unlike people we have seen landlords consistently hire, educated in the top 10% of a then-top 10 law school; experienced in legal practice for 20 years, even though I wasn't a litigator; and still competent to learn and apply law, though I stopped practicing law to get qualified to start Home Grown Food Network over 11 years ago. We've also had an incredible amount of luck along the way, which has made us think maybe the Universe knows it is unfair to punish good people like us and help people who lie and otherwise do act like true scum, so we deserve some amazing breaks to help us. One process server, for example, claimed to have posted a three-day notice on our door because no one could be found on the property to personally serve us, at the very same time when there were at least five workers AND THE LANDLORD on the property along with both of us. The landlord's case based on that alleged service eventually had to be dismissed, and that led to a long delay that was part of two years when we were not paying rent because we had given notice that the property was uninhabitable, which is why there were workers there working. Not getting rent for two years and paying attorney's fees for that kind of sloppy work eventually made the landlord want to pay us what it took to settle. Many breaks just like that happened in the cases against the current landlord. For example, retaliating against us for exercising constitutional rights is an issue over and over. The landlords have to keep proving whatever they did in the particular context was really done because we were violating park rules or a law and that is what they were really concerned about. That becomes difficult when we have WRITTEN documents showing we got the very first letter from any of their lawyers 11 days after the date of our complaint to the government against them. It also is difficult to prove they really care about park rules when that letter tells us we must stop parking on the common area driveways as we had been doing every day and night we were here for 18 months by that time. Kinda seems like they were trying to get us for some other reason. That was over two years ago, on May 12, 2006. Since then we have numerous other obvious moments of truth about our landlords. As time has gone on and we have gotten more and more of our building projects done, it is more and more obvious we never were and certainly aren't now violating any park rules or laws. I wrote them letters showing exactly how that was so every time they made some bogus claim. For instance, as we were accumulating the recycled building materials we have later used in our building and gardening here, there have been what they could with some surface legitimacy call instances where something that looked like “clutter” could be pointed out. They always went overboard and called it debris and trash instead, so it would have been difficult for them once there was opposition to a case based on those notices, which were never specific as the law requires anyway. However, as time went on they became so desperate to point some such something out that it has become not just easy to prove there is some other reason they are doing it, but it has become laughable. For instance, lately they actually called our $500 cement mixer “clutter” in one of their notices to us. Another time they said the $300 gazebo we had put up in our side yard—almost completely invisible to them from park driveways behind oleanders anyway—had to be removed because it was allegedly “combustible.” That's about all they could say, since “patio furniture” is allowed in yards under their rules, so whatever was objectionable about ours had to go beyond its being not something that in their opinion should be outside, which was at the time their catchall objection. (Canvas cushions on patio chairs, for instance, were one of their repeated favorite objections about our yards. No problem to them that every time I got a notice about canvas cushions outside—besides the obvious well-known fact that canvas cushions are common in yards throughout America—I would take pictures of about 20 canvas cushions in other yards here in the park that same day. One day there were planks open in the fence between our yard and the manager's behind us when we received such a notice, so I actually took pictures of canvas cushions on a chaise in THE MANAGER'S yard!) Clearly gazebos are by definition made to go outside. So it seemed easy enough to these rocket scientists to just say ours was “combustible,” so it had to go. Any desperate attempt to make us seem in violation of some rule. (Of course we start with the small problem for them of there actually being no rule or law against combustible things in yards, which is why one of our neighbors has a wooden BUILDING in the back yard, taking up virtually all the yard, and the owner himself has a wooden workshop building built right up to the property line next to our parking spaces. Both of these had been there since we moved here in 2004, and one day flames started from an electrical transformer not 10 feet above that wooden workshop. These Einsteins got around the nonexistence of a rule against combustible items by saying we had “impermissible items” in our yard and citing no rule that made the gazebo even “impermissible.”) The day we got the notice about our gazebo we got proof from its manufacturer and provided that to the landlords' attorneys that it was made of fire-retardant metal, and it is proper and safe for use next to and even attached to combustible homes. The next notice about that just left out the claim that the gazebo was “combustible,” but it still said we had to remove it. By then, deleting the claim about combustibility left no reason we would have to remove it, but that did not bother these brilliant people in the slightest. So it has been an incredible series of lucky breaks that we can now prove from their very own writing that it could not possibly have been some legitimate reason they were trying to get us to stop remodeling our house the way we were and stop suing them about their interference with our constitutional rights. That always beings us back to, then why would they do it? Why would they spend thousands of dollars on attorneys' fees and waste years litigating against tenants just remodeling their own house? First I say to myself, just think what Dr. Phil told Oprah when the beef growers in Texas were suing her for saying after she learned about mad cow disease she was never going to eat another burger again, and she kept saying it was unbelievable that she had to disrupt her life to defend against such a ridiculous suit. He said stop wondering why they are doing it and spend your time devising a winning strategy, or the line to sue Oprah will get very long. We don't have to worry so much about people suing us, as we are hardly the deep pockets Oprah is. As deep pockets go, we're more like a solid seam, totally judgment-proof. However, wondering why they are doing it and saying it is unbelievable are for the most part the same kind of waste of time for us from devising a winning strategy as they were for Oprah. In our case why they are doing it turns out later to be an important issue, but when we are beginning to devise a strategy and spending time working on it, we need to stick to that, instead of wondering why anyone would do this to us. Then I tried, three or four times, to get the resident manager, then one of the landlords himself, then all of the landlords' attorneys I have dealt with, to see we are not dangerous people if they would just leave us alone. We are not violating any rules except trivial ones we haven't been notified about, like forgetting to get our car registration renewed 25 days before we got a notice about it, the same day I took pictures of cars parked here over TWO YEARS past the registration dates on their license plates. (By the way, I took pictures again a few weeks ago, three or so months after we got that notice about our car registration, and some of those with 2005 license plates are still parked here, where I have seen them the whole time, dusty, with flat tires, terrible looking actually whereas our car was drivable and clean. Also, in the meantime a wrecked car with the front windshield totally smashed and the top caved in has been parked in the corner of the park for a month. Nothing has been done that I can see to protect property owners of and in this park from destruction of their property values from that trash and debris being parked right in plain sight in the front of the park. It's still there today. I just looked.) After that didn't work, I did just what Dr. Phil convinced Oprah to do: no matter how silly or unfair it is that we have to lose $150,000 in income to fight these landlords, we are doing it, and we will ultimately win and get our money back, plus more, and make an example of these landlords to deter other landlords from doing the same kind of thing to other tenants just lawfully exercising their constitutional rights. Anyway, so far we have won. We are still here, almost two-and-a-half years later, after they first tried to get us to leave, and they have yet to win anything against us. We are on appeal about denial of our motion to dismiss their case for being a SLAPP, which is a retaliatory lawsuit someone files against someone else, knowing it can't win, but trying to keep the other side from exercising constitutional rights. Even the judge who denied our motion knows it should have been granted--and it should certainly have been--so I hope we will find an attorney who wants to go on the appeal with us and get $50,000 or so in attorney's fees for winning that appeal. The landlords did not even present any evidence to the judge of why they were suing us other than to retaliate against us for remodeling our house in a way they do not like and complaining to the government about their earlier violations of our rights. NO EVIDENCE! NONE! They just presented argument. I have never seen such an easy case. The reason I know the judge knows he should have granted our motion is he made us write the statement of decision we requested when he announced we lost the motion, when the winner always has to write that; we wrote it saying there was no evidence to support what the landlords said but the judge just believed them and that was that; the landlords didn't even file any objections to that proposed statement of decision; and over two months later the judge issued a minute order that he was denying our request for a statement of decision. He had already decided we were going to get a statement of decision. That is why he ordered us to write, serve, and file the proposed one. But when you look at what happened in black and white--that he ruled in their favor with absolutely no evidence to support that ruling--he just couldn't sign the statement of decision saying that. Of course the rocket scientists didn't help him any by not filing any objections to that proposed statement, but on the other hand, what could they do? There wasn't any evidence submitted. You can't both manufacture the evidence afterwards and manufacture the fact that it was submitted in response to the motion, as well. There simply is no evidence that they ever had any legitimate reason to try to get an injunction against us, and that is why they tried to obfuscate issues by arguing instead of submitting evidence of facts. I write them letters showing exactly why they have no legitimate reason, every time they try again to come up with some reason. Their notices never have what the law requires in the first place: dates, times, witnesses, and specific facts showing violation of a rule. That is, except for the trivial retaliatory things like car registration 25 days overdue when others are years overdue and nothing happens to them. Nonetheless, I give dates, times, witnesses, and specific facts showing there either is no violation of any rule or that there is could not be why we got a notice. So for now, being here is the best revenge against unfair, illegitimate actions attacking us for exercising our constitutional rights. We are not wasting any more time asking why the attack happened. We are just trying not to violate even any trivial rules, to stick to issues of substance, and to keep on doing the necessary footwork to win. We also are continuing to exercise our constitutional right of freedom of expression. We are doing that by remodeling our house any legal way that seems appropriate to us and possibly helpful to 30 million people in America who never will own their own homes unless some inexpensive workable way to provide owned housing is demonstrated. The issues of 30 million and two people's freedom of expression are not subject to anyone's unlawful veto. E mail: brenda@home-grown.org This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site Easy, Free, Perennial (and Cool) Desert Food Garden in August August 2, 2008 Brenda Barnes, President, Home Grown Food Network, Inc. At least one of us had to stay here at all times this summer at the Home Grown Food Network demonstration house near Palm Springs, in a mobilehome park in Desert Hot Springs, California. I've written before about how since we started the lawsuit for damages against the park owners in June 2006 for interfering with how we are remodeling our house, and for retaliating against us for going to the government about that interference, every time both of us leave something awful happens to the house. As much as we've worked on it now, and as much as we both love it, we couldn't bear that again, so we've agreed one of us will always be here to take pictures and record what happens on an audio recorder and if possible video, too. I've had to work on a real estate project in Arizona, so mostly left on guard duty has been my husband and vice-president of Home Grown Food Network, Peter. It's amazing how much work he has gotten done both on remodeling the house and grounds and on improving the gardens. I think coming back on weekends and knowing I have only a few days makes me more efficient too, so we have really changed things this summer. Also, we are in the process of being evicted if we cannot show we are not violating any reasonable park rules by anything we are doing, and when things are in the middle it is difficult to show that, so we have been trying to finish many projects, and we have succeeded. Peter has the wall marking the east edge of the front-yard courtyard, which is eventually going to be eight feet high and over 14 feet long, up to almost the top of our heads, on the first 10' section. He's using reusable forms and a 5% Portland cement and soil mixture, to see if that is enough. We learned that from the late great architect Nader Khalili at CalEarth in Hesperia, who showed how it works for dome houses made from mostly earth stuffed in continuous plastic tubes he calls SuperAdobe bags. So far it seems great even though we used no bags. Each layer, less than a foot in depth, dries rock-hard in about two or three days, hard enough to put the next layer on above it. This brought us to think about a moment of truth about our landlords. They actually called our $500 cement mixer (left over from our consumption-driven limousine liberal days) “clutter” in one of their notices to us. That “clutter” has been the real time-saver on that project. Khalili says a family can mix up the mostly soil mixture with just coffee cans, and that works. I've seen it done several times, in 29 Palms and in Hesperia. However, a little help from good tools saves so much time. In doing most of these projects, there is always a choice between investing time and labor and investing money. We feel like serfs sometimes, since now we don't have any money because we've lost $150,000 in income fighting our landlords. So to see a project move quickly because we happened to have the right expensive tool invigorated both of us. The greenhouse in the gazebo frame on the East side of the house is coming along, too. Peter decided to dig soil for the courtyard wall from the middle of that space because it was slowing him down so much to bring soil from the desert, so I decided to wait to put in growing tables and to start them at the lower level of grade where that interior will be when he finishes. Actually, that will give us another foot or so of height to grow in. I decided to shade the greenhouse with vines the way we have the back yard, rather than the greenhouse-grade plastic and shade cloth to put over the frame I was going to use. This week we bought two $19 passion fruit vines at Home Depot, and a soaker hose to water them. We planted them in the moonlight before I went back to Arizona Sunday night, and they seem to have settled in perfectly. This weekend I will have time to put in string for them to grow up and a welded fence panel on the roof for them to grow onto. The planting directions had all kinds of stuff about non-organic brand-name fertilizers, which of course we ignored, but they did say put a 2” layer of mulch on the plant after it is planted, and we did that, since we mulch everything. That reminded me of another moment of truth about our landlords. They actually sent me a letter once about a year ago saying we had a fire hazard here from all the mulch. That time they focused on three limbs one or more of them saw by bending down and peeking through our west garden trellis at three feet from the ground and lower, or maybe leaning over the four-feet high 10' long strip of low fence at the west very back boundary. (Maybe we will get that up to 6' this weekend, or almost certainly next weekend, and Peter put up art against the trellis this week to stop their bending peering.) I had pruned the limbs from a jacaranda and stacked them on the ground to shred later in our electric shredder. Amazingly, the landlords pay for the water we use, so it is incredible they would object to mulching, one of the three main purposes of which is to save water. But there you have it, the kind of thing that causes people to attack others, most often based on ignorance combined with unlimited arrogance that keeps them from educating themselves out of that ignorance. I answered that letter. They never objected to mulch again. About a month ago, I bought the misting system I planned to use in the gazebo greenhouse to keep it cool for our working and spending time in, and a faucet divider to send water to the mister from the east side faucet, but this morning I decided not to put that in. I've been getting a set of newsletters in my e-mail from Mike McGroarty for years, and I decided to use his intermittent misting system to help seeds germinate and cuttings root instead. Once I saw how high the passion fruit vines were growing in a week straight from the store, and I realized how much coolness will be in that greenhouse from their going all over the roof within a year, I realized we won't need a mister to cool it. In fact, this morning I took some pictures in the back yard where Peter has perfected a method of keeping the sweet potato vines over the area from breaking the arbor. It was so dark the camera flash went off, while there was full sun of the desert five feet away, and it was so cool it approached needing a sweater, when it was over 100 degrees outside. So I'll use misting only as it is needed for plants, not people, after all. I also took pictures of new tomato flowers and a small green tomato that grew this week while I was gone—how amazing in a 115-degree afternoon sun area; a new pineapple plant that has started from a top I planted when we ate the fruit; two doves I decided are the same ones I saw on the fence a few weeks ago, this time on the back of the patio loveseat next to the bicycle behind the storage building, and they didn't fly away when I was less than two feet from them; and the sweet potato vines growing at the edge of the back yard arbor almost back to the ground, so thick you can hardly see the car in the parking space beyond. view complete image album here Peter is extending the arbor so it will shade the window in our back door. That is not an easy project to work out since supports have to be out of the way of both the back door and the gate to the back yard opening, all of which we put in and adapted for various purposes as we went along, so haven't planned really well. What a difference the sweet potato vine arbor has made in how comfortable the house is, but getting that window shaded will be a major plus. What a great life! Semi-tropical and Mediterranean in the desert. I'll write more soon. Keep cool. This post is also published on Home Grown Food Network's Wordpress site More HGFN blogs (July 08)